The Launch of ‘Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature’
On October 17 of this year, Stanford University Press published Refqa Abu-Remaileh’s “Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature,” which is available online at countryofwords.org.
The project, made available through the press’s “Stanford Digital Projects” imprint, is an “an interactive digital archive that allows us to retrace and remap the global story of Palestinian literature in the twentieth century, starting from the Arab world, and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America.”
As SUP writes:
Spanning the course of the twentieth century, Country of Words both reveals and recreates networks of the data and narrative fragments that constitute a literature-in-motion, bringing together porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into an elastic, open-ended literary history. With an unprecedented number of the world’s population living as refugees, exiles, or stateless people, this interactive digital archive also pioneers a new method of “reading together” national and exilic cultures, encouraging a transnational comparative perspective in literary studies.
The beautifully designed digital publication highlights connective tissue between Palestinian literatures and literary figures around the world, and there are numerous insets of print publications from throughout the twentieth century, from Arabic publications in Chile in the 1930s to the booklet for the first Arab Palestinian Book Fair, held in Jerusalem in 1946, to Lotus in the 1980s, and it includes several unique maps as, for instance, a map of locations of Palestinian literary figures post-Beirut 1982.
The site is dense and some pages take a while to load, so visitors on slow connections will need a little patience. Find the whole project at countryofwords.org.