Recollective Performativity and Embedded Violence in Gazan Collective Memory

The Gaza Strip, a once thriving seaside community, has for the past six decades remained locked in a state of spatial destruction and reconstruction coinciding with cyclic war & state-sponsored violence. In many ways, this cyclic state of war can be seen as a series of formative events that form the core of Palestinian collective memory and community identity. This paper draws on a corpus of sociolinguistic data that was collected during fieldwork conducted in the Gaza Strip in 2013 and will focus on the ways in which violence has been embedded in Palestinian collective memory and community discourse. The evidence for this complex process of embedding can be seen in representations of these formative events through the arts, literature, and speech of the Palestinian community. This study focuses in particular on the notion of "Recollective Performativity"; the ways in which formative events for the Palestinian community are actively remembered and how this remembrance is performed. In particular, this paper focuses on a discrete political event: the War of 1948 (referred to in Arabic as the Nakba 'catastrophe'). The War of 1948 serves as a watershed moment in Palestinian collective memory and members of the community have internalized the histories of dispossession attached to this event. This paper will explore the ways in which this particular event is recalled and performed by those individuals who lived it, as well as by younger generations who are able to share the stories of their families experience in 1948.