Summary
Anna Bernard’s term, adapted from Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘democratic imaginary’, for the way literary texts depict the ‘state/citizen bind’ in terms of a population’s composition — the literary representation of the national ‘same’, which can project more expansive and emancipatory polities than the status quo (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.45-46).
Details
- The term is introduced as a central component of Palestinian and Israeli national narration: the texts in Bernard’s study respond to the conflict’s most fundamental question — who is a citizen, and of what kind of polity? (PDF p.22).
- It is set against the ‘Demographic problem’: where that phrase suppresses the mass expulsions of Palestinians in 1948 that achieved the Jewish majority and conjures ‘transfer’ as a solution, a demographic imaginary can envision inclusion without identitarian bonding, as in Said’s 1995 speech projecting an undivided Jerusalem “truer to its complex mixture of religions, histories and cultures” (2011, 66, quoted PDF p.46) (PDF p.45-46).
- In the larger political entity of Israel plus the occupied territories, Bernard notes, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis are roughly equal in number, with the most recent figures giving Palestinians an edge (CIA Factbook, cited PDF p.46).
- Said’s Out of Place and Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah are distinguished by their very different conceptualizations of a Palestinian demographic imaginary (PDF p.22-23).
- Chapter 1’s close (PDF p.47-49) defines the mechanism: through Lukács’s ‘recourse to biographical form’ (1971, 81) and Larsen’s extension (2001, 180–81), the nation is the mediated form constituting the protagonist as a social subject and, politically, as a citizen, so any text structurally reliant on biographical form produces its own demographic imaginary — its own criteria for citizenship and belonging — across novel, testimony, memoir and autobiography. In international circulation those imaginings advocate a definition of citizenship to a wider readership, and narrative literature works as a laboratory for testing ways of organizing a polity (PDF p.47-49).
- In Out of Place the demographic imaginary is more ambiguous than in Said’s political writings of the period, in which he had begun to advocate a secular-democratic or binational single state in all of mandatory Palestine: a collectivity must be inferred from Said’s own formation, and its belonging is anchored in critical solidarity and political activism rather than in geographic or ethnic origins (PDF p.54-55).
- Barghouti’s is a differentiated demographic imaginary (PDF p.89): I Saw Ramallah juxtaposes his own exile with Palestinians whose lives are defined not by displacement but by occupation, without collapsing the two experiences, and its national formation is coalitional rather than identitarian — members joined by total subjection to Israeli policy and a general demand for self-determination (PDF p.89-95).
- Oz’s is a separatist demographic imaginary projected paradoxically and obliquely (PDF p.105): his novels deny their investment in representing collectivity while recasting the desire to live as a Jew among Jews as a non-dominatory expression of personal freedom; their endings consolidate a demographic imaginary based on inherent shared identity and desire among Israeli Jews, in striking contrast to the positional and coalitional Palestinian models of Bernard’s Chapters 2–3 (PDF p.119).
- Chapter 5 seeks ‘a new demographic imaginary divorced from patriarchy’ (PDF p.129): Castel-Bloom’s negatively figures a more egalitarian collectivity of Jewish Israeli women without contesting the exclusion of non-Jews (PDF p.130-131, p.136), and Khalifeh’s is articulated through the collective dimensions of Ahmad’s private tragedy in The End of Spring (PDF p.142).
- Shammas’ Arabesques promotes ‘the most radical demographic imaginary of any of the texts addressed in this book’ (PDF p.150): a national narration connecting the ‘two narratives’ in one vision, based on common political status rather than common identity, and — through Michael Abyad — implicating all Palestinians, not just Palestinian Israelis, in the creation of a Hebrew-language narrative of Israel/Palestine’s history (PDF p.148, p.163).
- Chapter 6’s close (PDF p.166-167) completes that claim: Shammas advances ‘an already existing demographic imaginary in Israel/Palestine’ that includes not only the ‘non-Jewish Israeli’ but all Palestinians, and replaces an ethno-religious understanding of the nation with a more inclusive, horizontal definition based on political consent, not biological descent (Sollors, 1986) — something, Bernard says, none of the other authors in the study, however utopian their vision, has been able to articulate.
Related pages
Rhetorics of Belonging, Demographic problem, National narration, Ethnocracy