This study starts with a brief presentation of the semantics of return as a radial category with a core and a periphery constructed through extensions. Reference is made to the inner Palestinian debate on the right of return between maximalists, who tend to use meanings closer to the core, and pragmatists using peripheral extended meanings. The main part of the paper is an analysis of Anton Shammas’s short story Autocartography: The case of Palestine, Michigan. It is shown how Shammas’s narrator deconstructs the components of the term return, an act which renders the national modernist debate ridiculous. In an authorial intervention in the postscript of the story, Shammas exposes his own hybridity, offering a non-nationalist perspective on the issue of the right of return.
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