Politics and Pedagogy in Palestinian Women’s Anglophone Writing

This paper outlines the narrative strategies and compromises deployed in three prominent anglophone novels by Palestinian women: Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010), Selma Debbagh’s Out of It (2012), and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses (2017). In contrast to Palestinian women authors writing in Arabic, undertaking a project of internal critique of Palestinian patriarchy, these three anglophone works anticipate a western readership and, in doing so, attempt to mediate between the marginalization of Palestinian women on the one hand and the orientalist, Islamophobic, and Zionist discourses that frame western perceptions of Palestinians—and particularly Palestinian male subjects—on the other.