Resisting erasure: Palestinian literature and informal archives

This article explores the potential of literary writing to feed into informal archives, with a focus on the current Palestinian context and the war on Gaza. Informal archives emerge from below, often in response to silences, to preserve experiences and narratives excluded or eclipsed in official records. In a setting marked by international crimes and by epistemic violence, Palestinian literature ‘presences’ and records lived experiences. This article proposes that Palestinian literary writing can be conceptualised, at least in part, as a form of counter-hegemonic documentation and memory work, challenging dominant modes of knowledge production and hegemonic narratives about the conflict. Against the backdrop of Israel’s ongoing violations of international law and epistemic violence by institutions in the Global North, Palestinian literature constitutes both a form of epistemic resistance and an act of survival aimed at preventing further disappearance. In Gaza, the existence of informal archives has become particularly urgent, as Israel’s deliberate destruction of archives and knowledge production compels Palestinians to preserve their history and memories through alternative forms, including literary writing.