After Nostalgia: Revisiting Palestine’s Poetics of al-Andalus

During the past thirty years, scholars of Arab cultural politics have struggled to articulate modern Palestinians’ unique ways of viewing the medieval past. Al-Andalus in particular fascinates authors and visual artists of Palestine. Our current theoretical framework within Arabic literature is poorly adapted to the sweeping historiography that these authors and artists create. This article revises the academic consensus that nostalgia is the organizing principle for Palestinian expressions of Andalusi identity. It provides a new way to understand the relationship between modern Palestinian poetics and the idea of a past Arab Iberia. Shifting from the affective theory of nostalgia that culminated in the early 1990s, I argue that Palestine’s version of al-Andalus in the twenty-first century works primarily as an artistic technique of reading Maghrebi texts rather than as an idyllic geographic place.