When the World Collapses in Palestine

Engaging with the ongoing collapse of lifeworlds experienced in Palestine, this article reinforces the urgent need to eliminate colonial grammars of
differentiation in order to reinscribe life and place in a rapidly warming world. By throwing the violent material and discursive productions that have attempted to engender the social and material death of Palestinians and Palestine into crisis, this intertextual reading of Palestinian literature aims to transgress the system of representations that have long rendered Palestine, as with other “zones of nonbeing,” the materiality upon which colonial and imperial accumulation take shape. The article first delves into critiques of the Anthropocene, a concept traditionally centered on a proverbial undifferentiated humanity’s global environmental impact. These discussions can aid our understanding of the catastrophic colonial present. Attention
is then drawn to the vital question of who is even considered human in the Anthropocene, drawing on the poetics and politics of Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmud Darwish, Edward Said, and others to reassert the humanity that prevails in the collapse. Finally, the essay turns to recent conversations among climate thinkers to consider the interlocking architectures of Palestinian liberation and climate futures. The aim is to challenge conventional definitions of humanism, demonstrating how the Palestinian experience can both serve as a material allegory for broader crises like planetary climatic collapse and scrutinize the universality of narratives that homogenize ongoing genocide and ruination.