From identity to subjectivity, from Sumud to post-Sumud: a psychoanalytic reading of post-millennial Palestinian literature

Shahin, Shada (2025). From identity to subjectivity, from Sumud to post-Sumud: a psychoanalytic reading of post-millennial Palestinian literature. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

Sumud, which loosely translates as steadfastness, steadfast perseverance, stalwartness, or resilience, has long been the dominant cultural, political, and psychological lens through which Palestinian identity, agency, and strategies of endurance have been understood. In this thesis, I argue that today this framework risks overlooking more complex and immediate fractures, ambivalences, and vulnerabilities that accompany life under occupation and total war, obscuring other realities and deeper desires currently intensifying political and psychic estrangement in Palestine.
Employing a critical and decolonial psychoanalytic lens, I demonstrate how post-millennial literature, particularly that which speaks for, by, or about Palestine’s younger generations, exposes the psychological burden borne by the younger generations, who are acutely aware of the futility of failed political promises and psychologically exhausted by a trauma that has become their ordinary. Expanding the concept of sumud to encompass post-sumud sensibilities—complex subjectivities, vulnerabilities, and psychic wounding—integral to the post-millennial political landscape, I offer a new understanding of how contemporary Palestinian literature grapples with the present reality and its profound psychic implications and ambivalences.
To understand the history of the shift to a post-sumud era, I examine the diverse, often contradictory, modes of articulation of Palestinian subjectivity and identity formation in the work of three Palestinian writers from across three different geographical locations: exile, Israel, and the West Bank. Beginning with the widely influential work of Jordan/Egypt-based Mourid Barghouti (1944-2021), one of the last of the 1970s generation of Palestinian writers and intellectuals, I track how versions of post-Oslo and post-millennial Palestinian subjectivities are negotiated and contested in the new writing of Israel/Missouri-based Sayed Kashua (b. 1975), and West Bank-based Ahlam Bsharat (b. 1975).
Both psychoanalysis and literature focus on what arises in the everyday lives of individuals. By critically pairing the two, I conclude that a new phase of Palestinian writing now offers a challenge not only to the brutal immorality of occupation, but to nationalist narratives of collective and heroic resilience.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):