The expansion of the Palestinian Diaspora and the unprecedented increase in the number of global Palestinian communities since 1948 has transformed the collective identities of its members. This research explores the richly complex worlds of an extraordinary generation of Palestinian young adults, whose families migrated to different corners of the Palestinian diaspora since their departure from their homes in or around 1948. The Palestinian Diaspora today consists of diverse groups whose ongoing cultures, politics, and identities tied to inherited memories of exile and collective trauma in the wake of the settler-colonialism, the memories of which shape their cultural interactions in everyday contexts. By utilizing the in-depth oral narratives of diasporic Palestinians, this research explores how inherited memory is preserved, mediated, and called upon as the individual searches for an ‘authentic self’ during their formative years. I analyze the making of a new, multinational Palestinian identity that characterizes its youngest generation of young adults, and how they create a spectrum of Palestinian identities that help them carve out places of their own in a changing, twenty-first-century global community. This thesis reveals that region, race, gender, and belonging shape how young Palestinians remember their familial and collective histories, as well how they act upon such memories as they construct what it means to be Palestinian
