Potentiality of Power Subversion Amidst Ontological Erasure in Shibli’s Minor Detail

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2026

Abstract

Written over the course of twelve years after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada/the Second Palestinian Intifada (2000-2005), Adania Shibli's Tafseel Thanawy/Minor Detail (2017), is historically conditioned by years of Zionist settler-colonial practices. Aesthetically representing the silencing of a Palestinian Bedouin girl’s gang rape and murder back in 1949, Minor Detail manifests the historical forces bound by Zionist settler-colonial episteme prompting the entire narrative. Intrinsically annihilative, the Zionist settler-colonial episteme has controlled, conditioned and diachronically maintained Zionist material and discursive practices to advance Palestinian ontological erasure and Hebraization of their land. Accordingly, the convergence of the New Historicist mode of literary analysis and decolonial approaches, particularly that of Walter Mignolo's colonial de-linking and epistemic disobedience, are adopted to analyse Minor Detail. Therefore, my paper argues that though Minor Detail practices colonial de-linking and engages with epistemic disobedience, it has remained controlled by the Zionist settler-colonial epistemic order it attempts to subvert.

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