Edward Said and the re-drawing of the (post)colonial political map of Palestine (original) (raw)
It is to the premise of Edward Said as a figure of dissent that I am inclined to subscribe in the course of this paper. My task in this endeavor is to critically trace some of the ideas conducive to Edward Said being the oppositional intellectual, the agent provocateur, in post-Oslo Palestine. It is what Said (1983) would call a "contrapuntal reading" as a "counter-narrative." It is a Saidian reading that attempts to understand the Oslo Accords, their disastrous consequences and the power mechanisms that led to them. It is worth noting that Said's (1999) concern stems from the fact that as an "Oriental" Palestinian who grew up in Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon-all subject to the domination of the colonizing West-he found it important to define the impact of the United States, where he later received his education and which has had such a profound effect on his own life and that of all other Orientals. As he says in the introduction to the re-edited version fo Orientalism (1978/1994), he writes from the perspective of an Arab/Palestinian with a strong concern and empathy for the region (p. 25). This identification is obvious from such statements as this: "Orientalism is written out of an extremely concrete history of personal loss and national disintegration," recalling Golda Meier's "notorious and deeply Orientalist comment about there Edward Said and Palestine 65 being no Palestinian people," which had been made only a few years before he wrote the book in the second half of the 1970s (Said, 1978/1994, p. 337). In a series of articles and books distinguished for their inclusiveness,
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