ABSTRACT This article explores how collaborative ways of making literature redefine literary texts as social processes, open up individual and canonical ideas of authorship, and create more immediate and relational modes of literary valuation and circulation. Focusing on contexts of displacement and using the Shatila Stories project (2018) as a case in point, the article examines the affordances and limitations of collaboration for emerging refugee authors, situating this practice at the intersection of assimilation and transnational solidarity. Based on an expanded understanding of literature that takes into account the social life and performative power of literary texts, the article shows how the making of Shatila Stories helps create imagined and lived forms of community that go beyond the nation-state. It also analyzes the (para)textual implications of writing together and the (in)visibilities that emerge when singular authorship and original writing interface with collaborative processes of rewriting, editing, and translating, while pointing to the challenges of collective funding and circulation practices that draw on affective relations and humanitarian discourses.
