Suited Tours of Urban Palestine: Literary Countermapping in Isabella Hammad’s <i>The Parisian</i> and Suad Amiry’s <i>Mother of Strangers</i>

Abstract This article explores how and why Isabella Hammad, in The Parisian, or Al-Barisi (2019) and Suad Amiry, in Mother of Strangers (2022), imaginatively return to Palestinian cities in the first half of the twentieth century. These novels each center a male protagonist who walks through Nablus and Jaffa, respectively, in a European suit. Read together, the novels span from the late 1910s, through the 1936–39 Revolt, to the cusp and aftermath of the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, tracing an arc from modernization to the shattering of Palestinian society. The article employs the heuristic of the Palestinian flâneur, a topos of modernity that these authors imaginatively reclaim in addressing Anglophone audiences, to explore the value of literary cartography for Palestinian urban heritage reconstruction. Hammad and Amiry present and solicit a wider reckoning with Palestinian cities as dynamic and diverse sites of self-fashioning, and with fiction as a critical heritage and countermapping resource.