'Performative narrativity': Palestinian identity and the performance of catastrophe

The day Israel annually celebrates as its "Day of Independence" Palestinians commemorate as their day of catastrophe (al-nakba). To most Palestinians, the catastrophic loss of Palestine in 1948 represents the climactic formative event of their lives. In the aftermath of this loss, the Palestinian society was transformed from a thriving society into a "nation of refugees" scattered over multiple geopolitical borders. In this article, I analyze audiovisual storytelling of al-nakba. I will perform this analysis on an audiovisual artifact that commemorates the Palestinians' loss of their homeland in the past, and articulates the "deep narratives" of their denial of home in ongoing exile: Mohammed Bakri's documentary 1948. My reading of Bakri's film considers aesthetic modes of narrativity through which those deep narratives of al-nakba can be accessed through acts of remembrance.