Against the Structural Weight of Catastrophe: A Poetics of Negation

<p>“To all those we are indebted to” brings together poetry, critical writing, image-making, drawing, and song in a multidisciplinary series that examines the politics of refusal in Palestine. Composed of four contributions assembled through paired collaboration, the contributors explore and develop novel ways of producing knowledge.</p> <p>What form does the enormity of the Palestinian Catastrophe take, and by which political grammars is its ongoing condition disrupted and contested? Combining materialist critique with poetic interjections, the authors propose reading the Nakba neither as an isolated event nor a reified structure, but as a series of violent negations running parallel to the catalytic force of resistance. In doing so, they redirect focus from overdetermined theorizations of colonial violence to generative practices of refusal, cautioning against the structural heft and imposed permanence of settler-colonialism. As Palestinians have repeatedly shown, the colonial limit is not impenetrable. The booklet also critically engages with iterations of Palestine’s vanishing map, commonly circulated as a convenient summary of dispossession. These cartographic representations are reinterpreted as a negative image that comes into focus with each act of resistance, gradually processing as land and self are restored.</p> <p><strong>Laura al-Tibi</strong> is a Palestinian writer and PhD student at Columbia University, specializing in the visual and literary histories of Palestine. Her research delves into the social and political dynamics of Palestinian photography before 1948, along with its aftermath of material devastation and historical erasure.</p> <p><strong>Amr Amer</strong> is a Palestinian musician who has been releasing music under the alias “Haykal” since 2012. His writing navigates between political and cultural themes, intertwined with personal reflections. At times, he strips away lyrics entirely, letting the rhythm and beats take center stage. He has collaborated with various artists across Palestine and the Arab world, including Makimakkuk, Muqata’a, Julmud, and El Rass. To date, he has released four EPs and is currently working on his first full-length album.</p>