Repression and Reclaiming of Female Voices of War History through Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.70091/Atras/vol07no01.24

Keywords:

Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, female body, history, resistance, reclaiming voice, Marginalisation, women in war, violence

Abstract

Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (2017) explores the themes of silencing and marginalising the voices of women in the occupied land of Palestine. The novel juxtaposes a story of brutal rape and murder during the Nakba, with an investigation of another woman to uncover the truth. The novel portrays the female body as a site of domination portraying the socio-cultural norms of excluding women's experiences from historical narratives. Drawing from the theoretical frameworks of Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak, Dubravka Zarkov, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the paper analyses the double marginalisation of women’s voice by political power and social norms. It simultaneously will reflect on how the author challenges such norms through the narrative strategies such as minor symbolism, specific narrative decisions, and spectral motifs. Through the novel, the author enacts on using literature as a resistance to reclaim subaltern voices and experiences, challenging historical erasure of suffering and memory of women.

References

Abu-Lughod, L. (2013). Do Muslim women need saving? Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674726338

Aamir, F. (2022). Palestinian modernism: Meaning making and alternative historical practices in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. Journal of Palestine Studies, 51(2), 34–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2022.2040323

Elbaz, E. (2023). Documenting the unarchivable: Minor Detail and the archive of senses. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 59(5), 607–619. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2256488

Gottschall, J. (2004). Explaining wartime rape. The Journal of Sex Research, 41(2), 129–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490409552221

Hawari, Y. (2019). The political marginalisation of Palestinian women in the West Bank (Policy Brief). Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.

Riach, G. K. (2017). An analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Macat International.

Shibli, A. (2020). Minor detail (E. Jaquette, Trans.). Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Spivak, G. C. (2023). Can the subaltern speak? In P. J. Cain & M. Harrison (Eds.), Imperialism: Critical concepts in historical studies (Vol. 3). Routledge.

Trouillot, M.-R. (2015). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history (20th anniv. ed.). Beacon Press.

Žarkov, D. (2007). The body of war: Media, ethnicity, and gender in the break-up of Yugoslavia. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822390183

Downloads

Published

2026202620262026-0101-2525

Similar Articles

1-10 of 49

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.