[...] The Palestinian novel arises out of conditions quite specific to the Palestinian conflict in its various stages from 1948 to the present. How do these geographical and historical specifities inform and, to an extent, determine novelist practice? What is the relationship between fictional words and actuality? Can imaginative accounts offer forms of knowledge unavailable to other kinds of writing? And how do these artistic practices by Palestinian novelists speak to literary and political concerns within a wider geographical context?

Powerful narratives do not give us static pictures of life; they are not true or accurate in any one-to-one mapping of the world. What they do, at their most imaginatively incisive, is foreground aspects of reality that go unnoticed, that are so familiar that we overlook them. More politically, they "redistribute the perceptible" as Jacques Ranciere says, bringing to light what is hidden in full view. They dislocate a sense of what is just "natural," unchangeable. In this way, they provide a dissensus, a dismantling of the consensual way of ordering how we perceive the world and how we evaluate it. [...]