The Camp, Overcome: Revolution and Movement in the Impossible Present

Chapter 3 studies the camp from the perspective of the Palestinian Revolution in the period between 1968 and 1982. Turning to literary forms, it argues that the Revolution was defined by the historical dilemma of forming a militant subject from the encamped refugee. But where political discourse mediated the camp as an object to be transformed into the means of its own overcoming, literary narratives came undone at precisely this point, registering an irresolvable tension, in their very form, between life and politics. The chapter takes on three novels of the revolutionary period to show that camp form and novel form are entangled. From this tension, the Palestinian Revolution appears as an event less about state capture or transition and more about an open-ended mode of subject formation.