Abstract
Emergency situations around the world have always presented a complicated and ostensibly paradoxical mix of crisis and continuity. This essay builds on the author's research into the cultural and literary history of the Emergency in India (1975 – 77) and on a reading of Paul Lynch's 2023 novel Prophet Song to address the ongoing and horrific crisis of 2023–24 in Palestine and Israel. Turning to genre as a way to look at emergencies and the ways in which we comprehend them, the article argues that once identified and declared, an emergency brings about an array of generically determined actions and reactions that seem inevitable and necessary. The crisis becomes disconnected from its historical origins, attendant only to the immanent logic of its genre. The logic of inevitability does not then allow a recognition of those strands of reality that are not embedded in the genres through which the world is already understood. Paying attention to the genres in which the current emergency is narrated, the article argues that the deadly violence in the Middle East is not, in fact, just a singular moment of crisis, nor is it just “more of the same,” or an inevitable result of a two-sided “conflict.” Shifting genres, one can recognize that the deadly violence today, and the occupation of which it is part, has a history and a politics that are human-made and can thus be unmade.
