Tahrir Hamdi | Arab Open University (original) (raw)

Papers by Tahrir Hamdi

Research paper thumbnail of A Political or Apolitical Literature

International journal of Arabic-English studies, 2007

A popular literary argument circulating the literary circuit nowadays concerns the supposedly "ap... more A popular literary argument circulating the literary circuit nowadays concerns the supposedly "apolitical" nature of literature. This view of literature and literary theory is particularly expounded in Western academic circles, which intentionally depoliticize the political, claiming that any "political" reading is propaganda, not scholarship. It will be argued that the "depoliticization" process is itself a political move at its core, as Edward Said explains in much of his work, especially in his book The World, The Text and The Critic. This research will examine when and why literature and literary theory become most significantly "political" or even "apolitical." This entails a close consideration of certain critical views and literatures arising in what has been called "crises cultures," in addition to a reconsideration of traditional apolitical readings of the works of English literary poets, such as

Research paper thumbnail of Book Review of Abdullah Dabbagh's Literary Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and Universalism

International journal of Arabic-English studies, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of Burying the Dead: The Postcolonial Strategies of Achebe and Naipaul

International journal of Arabic-English studies, 2008

Mapping out a successful postcolonial strategy/response for the 'native intellectual' is a worthw... more Mapping out a successful postcolonial strategy/response for the 'native intellectual' is a worthwhile endeavour in this global era, especially as the postcolonial subject is bombarded with countless Western-based theories that emphasize 'fragmented' or 'floating' identities, which occupy an ambiguous space. This paper will examine the strategies undertaken by two current postcolonial writers, V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe, who have negotiated for themselves ideologically opposed strategies, which as I will argue, represent radically different psychological states of development on the part of the two writers as evidenced by their work. Frantz Fanon's ideas on the development of the 'native intellectual' will be used to help bring the psyches of these two writers into sharper focus.

Research paper thumbnail of Decolonizing English Literature Departments At Arab Universities

Arab Studies Quarterly

Education in the Arab world is in need of a revolution, and this revolutionary transformation is ... more Education in the Arab world is in need of a revolution, and this revolutionary transformation is inevitably and intricately linked to the production, ordering, and dissemination of revolutionary, anti-colonial knowledge. This article emphasizes the urgency for decolonizing education, specifically English literature departments at Arab universities. Many thinkers have documented the connection between literature, culture, and imperialism on the one hand (Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest, 1989 and Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, 1993) and literature, culture, and resistance on the other hand (Fanon, Kanafani, Cabral, Said, and others who wrote about zero point epistemology). While there have been some decolonization efforts in different parts of the world, even at Ivy League institutions (Cornell University, for example), Arab universities ironically maintain a very rigid, government accredited English and American literary curriculum with no attempt or intention at decolo...

Research paper thumbnail of The Arab Intellectual and the Present Moment

Arab Studies Quarterly, 2019

The Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef urgently asks, “Why are the poets silent?/Where have they gone?” The... more The Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef urgently asks, “Why are the poets silent?/Where have they gone?” These questions underscore the compelling need for the guiding voices of Arab intellectuals at this deeply divided present moment in the Arab world that has effectively seen the destruction of seemingly stable nations and identities. It is important to understand why and how easily “things fell apart” for Arab nations and peoples under the destructive influence and direct intervention of imperialist and Zionist agendas and forces. What does it mean to speak truth to power in the current Arab and global context where the destruction of Arab nations, such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen has become the all too familiar, convenient, and accepted status quo, which is marked by destructive and exclusionary discourses? It has become incumbent upon the Arab intellectual/writer/poet to lead the self-examination process in order to provide an understanding of the current Arab situation within its gr...

Research paper thumbnail of The Power of Poetry to Travel: An Interview with Mourid Barghouti

Arab Studies Quarterly, 2016

A car pulls up and the driver comes out, revealing the tall, graceful figure of one of Palestine&... more A car pulls up and the driver comes out, revealing the tall, graceful figure of one of Palestine's most important and well-known poets, Mourid Barghouti, the author of twelve books of poetry and two excellent memoirs, I Saw Ramallah (2003) and the sequel I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2011). Barghouti's words, even if only routine greetings, are very carefully and elegantly spoken as he makes his way into the guest room and chooses the exact spot that would be his home for the next two and a half hours of this interview. The poet lights a cigarette and makes a polite request that coffee be his constant companion, but "please make it alqam [bitter]," he says. The conversation which follows travels from thoughts on poetry, religion, revolution, and Palestine to his son, the popular poet and scholar Tamim and Mourid Barghouti's late wife and Tamim's mother, the novelist and academic Radwa Ashour.Tahrir Hamdi The British poet W. H. Auden in his tribute to the Irish poet(TH): W. B. Yeats says "Poetry makes nothing happen," but he probably meant, not immediately, because after all, a poem is not a political slogan. In your long poem, "Midnight," you say:The importance of the brave intellectual minority in each and every society cannot be underestimated. And in this khaki age that we live in they are most needed. In the battle for language, silence is definitely not the answer and connivance is a crime.What can poetry do in our context? What can poetry make happen or not happen? Can poets create countries? I am saying this in the context of what has been said about the Irish poet W. B. Yeats-that he invented a country and called it Ireland.Mourid Barghouti I'll start by endorsing Auden's statement. Poetry(MB): can make nothing happen. Sometimes you feel that there is the following illusion-an audience expects that a poet writes a poem on Saturday and then the country is liberated on Sunday, or the dictator is overthrown the next day. A poem cannot liberate a street from its occupiers, cannot remove a dictator, no poetry, no poem, no poet can do that ... poetry does not work [in] this way. Poetry works slowly, on the front of the beautiful, the right, the imagination, and it works like a slow-release medicine that you take for your body; poetry works like a slow-release medicine for the mind and the soul of the receiver. It doesn't have an immediate effect, but it stays there and then it travels. Edward Said speaks about travelling theory. Poetry also travels. The word travels from one person to another, from one country to another, from one language to another, from one generation to another. That's why we could find a Tunisian teenager in a secluded room writing some lines and then he dies before he is twenty-five and then one hundred years later, the Tahrir Square in Egypt and the Bourgeba Street in Tunisia are rocking with his "If the people one day will to live/then destiny must respond." The line travelled through ages, through geography, through minds, through the pages.TH: So the poem survives ...MB: The poem survives, that's why we are still reading poems that have been written thousands of years ago.TH: But it can't have an immediate effect.MB: No, no ... I want to make a difference between music and military music. Military music is not music. Military music can do immediate things, can organize the steps of the boots of the soldiers, can send some enthusiasm only at the minute the conductor is leading the band. After that everybody goes to his kitchen, everyday business ... your poem, to deserve its name, should not affect only this audience, at this minute; it should have the power to influence another audience in another age, in another place, with another background. For instance, when Yeats wrote "Easter 1916" in Ireland-"a terrible beauty is born," I can feel it when an act of great heroism is done in any other country, in Palestine, Ireland, Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, so I mean, if you achieve the demands of the aesthetics of writing, then the work can survive, can acquire these two conditions of being influential outside its sphere and outside its generation, its time, time and place. …

Research paper thumbnail of Reading, imagining and constructing Iraq

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Edward Said, Postcolonialism and Palestine's Contested Spaces

Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 2017

Postcolonialism, profoundly influenced by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, has until recently... more Postcolonialism, profoundly influenced by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, has until recently been oddly silent on Palestine, a topic that not only preoccupied Said's thinking and writing, but also inspired his theoretical ideas on imperialism, anti-colonial struggle and the worldliness and affiliations of the text and the critic. This theoretical silence on Palestine was, in fact, preceded by a historical, political, geographical, social and cultural contestation of all forms of Palestinian spaces that include not only dispossessing Palestinians of their land, but also building apartheid walls, destroying hundreds of thousands of olive trees, appropriating/stealing traditional Palestinian dishes and clothes, silencing Palestinian narratives and the Muslim call to prayer. This paper will argue that these contested spaces necessarily become sites of Palestinian cultural production, struggle and sumud.

Research paper thumbnail of Imagining Palestine

Research paper thumbnail of Yeats's Ireland, Darwish's Palestine: The National in the Personal, Mystical, and Mythological

Arab Studies Quarterly, 2014

William Butler Yeats's and Mahmoud Darwish's poetic oeuvres can safely be said to have co... more William Butler Yeats's and Mahmoud Darwish's poetic oeuvres can safely be said to have contributed significantly to building distinct national consciousnesses for their respective nations of Ireland and Palestine. These poets have equipped themselves with unique repertoires, which include the personal, the mystical, and the mythological, not to escape into a more ideal or abstract world, but to create anew their homelands, which have been placed under political, social, cultural, and in Darwish's case, geographical erasure by oppressive imperialist/Zionist invaders and occupiers. Both poets take on their roles as politician/artist/magician seriously by using hypnotic and other magical techniques in order to focus their people's psyches on the idea of cultural and national liberation. The poetry of both Yeats and Darwish shows poignantly how a poet can embody the nation and how poetry can indeed make something happen.

Research paper thumbnail of Darwish's geography

Interventions, 2016

Mahmoud Darwish, the preeminent poet of Palestine, once said that his poems have built houses in ... more Mahmoud Darwish, the preeminent poet of Palestine, once said that his poems have built houses in a metaphorical landscape. For a poet who saw coffee as geography, it is difficult to imagine how one can separate Darwish, the individual, from the very idea of Palestine, which he sought to keep alive in almost every line he wrote, regardless of how personal the situation was that occasioned the writing of the poem as witnessed by his epic masterpiece, Mural. For Darwish, negotiating a Palestinian space, place and identity represents a lifelong project that he saw as an ongoing process or ‘under construction’ to use the poet's words from his long prose poem Memory for Forgetfulness. This essay shows how Darwish's poems become the ‘imagined geography’ of Palestine, to use Edward Said's term, to which the poet returns in Mural, reuniting the Palestinian with the land from which he was violently and unnaturally separated and returning the poet to his word. In addition to Said's ideas on geography, I use Benedict Anderson's idea of an imagined community and Edward Soja's concept of the thirdspace to help decipher Darwish's poetics of space, which combine the political, social, spatial and historical.

Research paper thumbnail of Where is Palestine in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood?

This article examines the theoretical/critical and literary silence on Palestine as represented b... more This article examines the theoretical/critical and literary silence on Palestine as represented by Caryl Phillips’s novel, The Nature of Blood. It is argued that the silence on Palestine is simultaneously political, historical, geographical and imaginative. In his novel, Phillips provides a framework of Jewish suffering and persecution in an anti-Semitic Europe which culminates in the Holocaust in order to justify the establishment of a Jewish homeland. The criticism Phillips directs at Israel has to do with Israel’s racism against black Jews. Phillips, who is ironically identified as a postcolonial writer, ignores the fact that Israel is also a colonial entity, which was established based on the belief that Israel would be an ethnically pure homeland for the Jewish people. Phillips’s inability or unwillingness to understand this basic given leads to his intentional erasure of a whole people, the Palestinians and their cause, a criticism that can also be leveled against trauma and p...

Research paper thumbnail of 1. Front Matter Front Matter

Research paper thumbnail of Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature

Race & Class, 2011

... Their 'return' to Haifa is very painful for the couple because they will have to un... more ... Their 'return' to Haifa is very painful for the couple because they will have to unearth what has been silently buried in their new life in Ramallah, not only an abandoned land but also an abandoned child, Khaldoun, who was only five months old when Safiyya, in hysteria, forgot ...

Research paper thumbnail of Edward Said and Recent Orientalist Critiques

Arab Studies Quarterly, 2013

ABSTRACT There have been many attempts in recent years to discredit Edward Said's thesis ... more ABSTRACT There have been many attempts in recent years to discredit Edward Said's thesis of the "affiliation of knowledge with power" (1997: xlix) by those who argue that Orientalist scholarship represents genuine and accurate knowledge of the Arab/Islamic world. Said's detractors claim that much of Orientalist scholarship has been "sympathetic" to the Orient and is free from any power motive. However, this article will attempt to show how all of these arguments fall apart when put to the test of reality, past and present, in literature, Orientalist scholarship and politics. After all the arguments of Bernard Lewis, Ibn Warraq and think tank and area experts, it is Said's voice of humanism that drowns out all of his dissenters' voices in this Orientalist war of words, which as Said believed, is "rich symptomatic of precisely what is denied" (1985: 91).

Research paper thumbnail of Late Style as Resistance in the Works of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti

Post-Millennial Palestine

This chapter critically engages with Edward W. Said’s conceptualization of ‘Late Style’ in light ... more This chapter critically engages with Edward W. Said’s conceptualization of ‘Late Style’ in light of continued catastrophic occurrences in Palestine. It argues that a ‘lateness of beginnings’ represents the Palestinian intellectual’s deepest resistance against catastrophe, impending death, dispossession, and colonization. In the face of continued catastrophe, resistance in post-millennial Palestine is currently being reinvigorated by the creativity of new Palestinian generations, who have attained a metaphorical lateness by the very means of the repetition of the catastrophic. The chapter explores the reconfiguration of Late Style resistance in the works of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti, arguing that these intellectuals’ works are important in foregrounding an oppositional criticism in the face of divisionist agendas at this most critical moment in the continuation of the Palestinian struggle.

Research paper thumbnail of Optimising the blended learning environment: the Arab Open University experience

Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning

Research paper thumbnail of The intellectual resistance of Yusuf Al-Ani

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World

Research paper thumbnail of The intellectual resistance of Yusuf Al-Ani

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World

Research paper thumbnail of The intellectual resistance of Yusuf Al-Ani

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World

Research paper thumbnail of A Political or Apolitical Literature

International journal of Arabic-English studies, 2007

A popular literary argument circulating the literary circuit nowadays concerns the supposedly "ap... more A popular literary argument circulating the literary circuit nowadays concerns the supposedly "apolitical" nature of literature. This view of literature and literary theory is particularly expounded in Western academic circles, which intentionally depoliticize the political, claiming that any "political" reading is propaganda, not scholarship. It will be argued that the "depoliticization" process is itself a political move at its core, as Edward Said explains in much of his work, especially in his book The World, The Text and The Critic. This research will examine when and why literature and literary theory become most significantly "political" or even "apolitical." This entails a close consideration of certain critical views and literatures arising in what has been called "crises cultures," in addition to a reconsideration of traditional apolitical readings of the works of English literary poets, such as

Research paper thumbnail of Book Review of Abdullah Dabbagh's Literary Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and Universalism

International journal of Arabic-English studies, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of Burying the Dead: The Postcolonial Strategies of Achebe and Naipaul

International journal of Arabic-English studies, 2008

Mapping out a successful postcolonial strategy/response for the 'native intellectual' is a worthw... more Mapping out a successful postcolonial strategy/response for the 'native intellectual' is a worthwhile endeavour in this global era, especially as the postcolonial subject is bombarded with countless Western-based theories that emphasize 'fragmented' or 'floating' identities, which occupy an ambiguous space. This paper will examine the strategies undertaken by two current postcolonial writers, V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe, who have negotiated for themselves ideologically opposed strategies, which as I will argue, represent radically different psychological states of development on the part of the two writers as evidenced by their work. Frantz Fanon's ideas on the development of the 'native intellectual' will be used to help bring the psyches of these two writers into sharper focus.

Research paper thumbnail of Decolonizing English Literature Departments At Arab Universities

Arab Studies Quarterly

Education in the Arab world is in need of a revolution, and this revolutionary transformation is ... more Education in the Arab world is in need of a revolution, and this revolutionary transformation is inevitably and intricately linked to the production, ordering, and dissemination of revolutionary, anti-colonial knowledge. This article emphasizes the urgency for decolonizing education, specifically English literature departments at Arab universities. Many thinkers have documented the connection between literature, culture, and imperialism on the one hand (Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest, 1989 and Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, 1993) and literature, culture, and resistance on the other hand (Fanon, Kanafani, Cabral, Said, and others who wrote about zero point epistemology). While there have been some decolonization efforts in different parts of the world, even at Ivy League institutions (Cornell University, for example), Arab universities ironically maintain a very rigid, government accredited English and American literary curriculum with no attempt or intention at decolo...

Research paper thumbnail of The Arab Intellectual and the Present Moment

Arab Studies Quarterly, 2019

The Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef urgently asks, “Why are the poets silent?/Where have they gone?” The... more The Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef urgently asks, “Why are the poets silent?/Where have they gone?” These questions underscore the compelling need for the guiding voices of Arab intellectuals at this deeply divided present moment in the Arab world that has effectively seen the destruction of seemingly stable nations and identities. It is important to understand why and how easily “things fell apart” for Arab nations and peoples under the destructive influence and direct intervention of imperialist and Zionist agendas and forces. What does it mean to speak truth to power in the current Arab and global context where the destruction of Arab nations, such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen has become the all too familiar, convenient, and accepted status quo, which is marked by destructive and exclusionary discourses? It has become incumbent upon the Arab intellectual/writer/poet to lead the self-examination process in order to provide an understanding of the current Arab situation within its gr...

Research paper thumbnail of The Power of Poetry to Travel: An Interview with Mourid Barghouti

Arab Studies Quarterly, 2016

A car pulls up and the driver comes out, revealing the tall, graceful figure of one of Palestine&... more A car pulls up and the driver comes out, revealing the tall, graceful figure of one of Palestine's most important and well-known poets, Mourid Barghouti, the author of twelve books of poetry and two excellent memoirs, I Saw Ramallah (2003) and the sequel I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2011). Barghouti's words, even if only routine greetings, are very carefully and elegantly spoken as he makes his way into the guest room and chooses the exact spot that would be his home for the next two and a half hours of this interview. The poet lights a cigarette and makes a polite request that coffee be his constant companion, but "please make it alqam [bitter]," he says. The conversation which follows travels from thoughts on poetry, religion, revolution, and Palestine to his son, the popular poet and scholar Tamim and Mourid Barghouti's late wife and Tamim's mother, the novelist and academic Radwa Ashour.Tahrir Hamdi The British poet W. H. Auden in his tribute to the Irish poet(TH): W. B. Yeats says "Poetry makes nothing happen," but he probably meant, not immediately, because after all, a poem is not a political slogan. In your long poem, "Midnight," you say:The importance of the brave intellectual minority in each and every society cannot be underestimated. And in this khaki age that we live in they are most needed. In the battle for language, silence is definitely not the answer and connivance is a crime.What can poetry do in our context? What can poetry make happen or not happen? Can poets create countries? I am saying this in the context of what has been said about the Irish poet W. B. Yeats-that he invented a country and called it Ireland.Mourid Barghouti I'll start by endorsing Auden's statement. Poetry(MB): can make nothing happen. Sometimes you feel that there is the following illusion-an audience expects that a poet writes a poem on Saturday and then the country is liberated on Sunday, or the dictator is overthrown the next day. A poem cannot liberate a street from its occupiers, cannot remove a dictator, no poetry, no poem, no poet can do that ... poetry does not work [in] this way. Poetry works slowly, on the front of the beautiful, the right, the imagination, and it works like a slow-release medicine that you take for your body; poetry works like a slow-release medicine for the mind and the soul of the receiver. It doesn't have an immediate effect, but it stays there and then it travels. Edward Said speaks about travelling theory. Poetry also travels. The word travels from one person to another, from one country to another, from one language to another, from one generation to another. That's why we could find a Tunisian teenager in a secluded room writing some lines and then he dies before he is twenty-five and then one hundred years later, the Tahrir Square in Egypt and the Bourgeba Street in Tunisia are rocking with his "If the people one day will to live/then destiny must respond." The line travelled through ages, through geography, through minds, through the pages.TH: So the poem survives ...MB: The poem survives, that's why we are still reading poems that have been written thousands of years ago.TH: But it can't have an immediate effect.MB: No, no ... I want to make a difference between music and military music. Military music is not music. Military music can do immediate things, can organize the steps of the boots of the soldiers, can send some enthusiasm only at the minute the conductor is leading the band. After that everybody goes to his kitchen, everyday business ... your poem, to deserve its name, should not affect only this audience, at this minute; it should have the power to influence another audience in another age, in another place, with another background. For instance, when Yeats wrote "Easter 1916" in Ireland-"a terrible beauty is born," I can feel it when an act of great heroism is done in any other country, in Palestine, Ireland, Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, so I mean, if you achieve the demands of the aesthetics of writing, then the work can survive, can acquire these two conditions of being influential outside its sphere and outside its generation, its time, time and place. …

Research paper thumbnail of Reading, imagining and constructing Iraq

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Edward Said, Postcolonialism and Palestine's Contested Spaces

Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 2017

Postcolonialism, profoundly influenced by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, has until recently... more Postcolonialism, profoundly influenced by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, has until recently been oddly silent on Palestine, a topic that not only preoccupied Said's thinking and writing, but also inspired his theoretical ideas on imperialism, anti-colonial struggle and the worldliness and affiliations of the text and the critic. This theoretical silence on Palestine was, in fact, preceded by a historical, political, geographical, social and cultural contestation of all forms of Palestinian spaces that include not only dispossessing Palestinians of their land, but also building apartheid walls, destroying hundreds of thousands of olive trees, appropriating/stealing traditional Palestinian dishes and clothes, silencing Palestinian narratives and the Muslim call to prayer. This paper will argue that these contested spaces necessarily become sites of Palestinian cultural production, struggle and sumud.

Research paper thumbnail of Imagining Palestine

Research paper thumbnail of Yeats's Ireland, Darwish's Palestine: The National in the Personal, Mystical, and Mythological

Arab Studies Quarterly, 2014

William Butler Yeats's and Mahmoud Darwish's poetic oeuvres can safely be said to have co... more William Butler Yeats's and Mahmoud Darwish's poetic oeuvres can safely be said to have contributed significantly to building distinct national consciousnesses for their respective nations of Ireland and Palestine. These poets have equipped themselves with unique repertoires, which include the personal, the mystical, and the mythological, not to escape into a more ideal or abstract world, but to create anew their homelands, which have been placed under political, social, cultural, and in Darwish's case, geographical erasure by oppressive imperialist/Zionist invaders and occupiers. Both poets take on their roles as politician/artist/magician seriously by using hypnotic and other magical techniques in order to focus their people's psyches on the idea of cultural and national liberation. The poetry of both Yeats and Darwish shows poignantly how a poet can embody the nation and how poetry can indeed make something happen.

Research paper thumbnail of Darwish's geography

Interventions, 2016

Mahmoud Darwish, the preeminent poet of Palestine, once said that his poems have built houses in ... more Mahmoud Darwish, the preeminent poet of Palestine, once said that his poems have built houses in a metaphorical landscape. For a poet who saw coffee as geography, it is difficult to imagine how one can separate Darwish, the individual, from the very idea of Palestine, which he sought to keep alive in almost every line he wrote, regardless of how personal the situation was that occasioned the writing of the poem as witnessed by his epic masterpiece, Mural. For Darwish, negotiating a Palestinian space, place and identity represents a lifelong project that he saw as an ongoing process or ‘under construction’ to use the poet's words from his long prose poem Memory for Forgetfulness. This essay shows how Darwish's poems become the ‘imagined geography’ of Palestine, to use Edward Said's term, to which the poet returns in Mural, reuniting the Palestinian with the land from which he was violently and unnaturally separated and returning the poet to his word. In addition to Said's ideas on geography, I use Benedict Anderson's idea of an imagined community and Edward Soja's concept of the thirdspace to help decipher Darwish's poetics of space, which combine the political, social, spatial and historical.

Research paper thumbnail of Where is Palestine in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood?

This article examines the theoretical/critical and literary silence on Palestine as represented b... more This article examines the theoretical/critical and literary silence on Palestine as represented by Caryl Phillips’s novel, The Nature of Blood. It is argued that the silence on Palestine is simultaneously political, historical, geographical and imaginative. In his novel, Phillips provides a framework of Jewish suffering and persecution in an anti-Semitic Europe which culminates in the Holocaust in order to justify the establishment of a Jewish homeland. The criticism Phillips directs at Israel has to do with Israel’s racism against black Jews. Phillips, who is ironically identified as a postcolonial writer, ignores the fact that Israel is also a colonial entity, which was established based on the belief that Israel would be an ethnically pure homeland for the Jewish people. Phillips’s inability or unwillingness to understand this basic given leads to his intentional erasure of a whole people, the Palestinians and their cause, a criticism that can also be leveled against trauma and p...

Research paper thumbnail of 1. Front Matter Front Matter

Research paper thumbnail of Bearing witness in Palestinian resistance literature

Race & Class, 2011

... Their 'return' to Haifa is very painful for the couple because they will have to un... more ... Their 'return' to Haifa is very painful for the couple because they will have to unearth what has been silently buried in their new life in Ramallah, not only an abandoned land but also an abandoned child, Khaldoun, who was only five months old when Safiyya, in hysteria, forgot ...

Research paper thumbnail of Edward Said and Recent Orientalist Critiques

Arab Studies Quarterly, 2013

ABSTRACT There have been many attempts in recent years to discredit Edward Said's thesis ... more ABSTRACT There have been many attempts in recent years to discredit Edward Said's thesis of the "affiliation of knowledge with power" (1997: xlix) by those who argue that Orientalist scholarship represents genuine and accurate knowledge of the Arab/Islamic world. Said's detractors claim that much of Orientalist scholarship has been "sympathetic" to the Orient and is free from any power motive. However, this article will attempt to show how all of these arguments fall apart when put to the test of reality, past and present, in literature, Orientalist scholarship and politics. After all the arguments of Bernard Lewis, Ibn Warraq and think tank and area experts, it is Said's voice of humanism that drowns out all of his dissenters' voices in this Orientalist war of words, which as Said believed, is "rich symptomatic of precisely what is denied" (1985: 91).

Research paper thumbnail of Late Style as Resistance in the Works of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti

Post-Millennial Palestine

This chapter critically engages with Edward W. Said’s conceptualization of ‘Late Style’ in light ... more This chapter critically engages with Edward W. Said’s conceptualization of ‘Late Style’ in light of continued catastrophic occurrences in Palestine. It argues that a ‘lateness of beginnings’ represents the Palestinian intellectual’s deepest resistance against catastrophe, impending death, dispossession, and colonization. In the face of continued catastrophe, resistance in post-millennial Palestine is currently being reinvigorated by the creativity of new Palestinian generations, who have attained a metaphorical lateness by the very means of the repetition of the catastrophic. The chapter explores the reconfiguration of Late Style resistance in the works of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti, arguing that these intellectuals’ works are important in foregrounding an oppositional criticism in the face of divisionist agendas at this most critical moment in the continuation of the Palestinian struggle.

Research paper thumbnail of Optimising the blended learning environment: the Arab Open University experience

Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning

Research paper thumbnail of The intellectual resistance of Yusuf Al-Ani

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World

Research paper thumbnail of The intellectual resistance of Yusuf Al-Ani

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World

Research paper thumbnail of The intellectual resistance of Yusuf Al-Ani

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World