Where is Palestine in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood? (original) (raw)
Related papers
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2008
This essay uses Fouzi El-Asmar's To Be an Arab in Israel as a point of departure to examine the plight of Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens since 1948, while also exploring the inherent contradictions within the logic and political economy of Zionism that situate Palestinians as a persistent and disturbing reminder of Israel's settler colonial aspirations. By taking inventory of the various ontological crises attending what it means to be a Palestinian living in Israel, as well as the historical vectors informing Zionism's various attempts to prevent the development of Palestinian civil society, Abraham argues that there are clear analogues between Palestinian and Jewish suffering. After completing a theoretical survey of the arguments informing defenses of, and apologies for, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and destruction of Gaza, Abraham turns to the ways in which the Holocaust has been used to shore up connections between Zionist and Jewish history. Fin...
Contemplating Palestine: matters of truth and justice with rage, love and anger
International Politics
In this essay, in conversation with Azmi Bishara's Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice, I am wrestling with how to write about Palestine, at the same moment that I am contending with the media's erasure and dehumanisation of Palestinian life, in January 2023. And here I am again, on 19 October, 2023, with the proofs for this piece arriving in my inbox, while witnessing bombs rain down on Gaza; a second Nakba and genocide that has the world's full awareness and legitimacy. I wrote and write, full of rage, full of anger and full of love.
The Other Version of the Story: National Identity in the Modern Palestinian Novel
Athens Journal of Philology, 2016
This survey article explores the parameters of the Palestinian national identity as represented in the fictional world of a number of Palestinian narratives written in Arabic and other languages over the past hundred years. More specifically, the article traces the dramatic transition of identity formation from personal discomfiture with the breakdown of self-interested enterprises to mass awareness of the existential threat posed by the Zionist Movement Project 1 against the national aspiration of the Palestinian people in Palestine as their only homeland. The threat in question was the consequence of the militant immigrant Jewish settlers who infiltrated into Palestine in successive waves of European Jewish immigrants in the wake of Sykes-Picot Agreement 2 and Balfour Declaration. 3 Ever since the coming out of the first Arab Palestinian novel, al-Wareth, 4 the issue of identity has been steadily gaining a central place in the Palestinian narrative art, irrespective of the stance and angle of vision from which the story is told. As a form of art of fiction, the Palestinian novel says something about the loss or distortion of the Palestinian national identity through a deliberate, programmed erosion of individual and collective memories, including history and popular culture. This purposeful erosion has been consistently the target of the single-handed historical narrative provided by the official annals of Israel 5 as an immigrant settlers' colonial project replacing the state of Palestine on the world map. The Palestinian narratives under study bring out into the open the long-denied version of the truth by unfolding the hidden narrative account of the Palestinian national identity for the fullness of history.
Introduction: the settler-colonial framing of Palestine—Matters of Justice and Truth
International Politics , 2023
As the publication of this forum coincides with the unfolding bombs raining down on the Palestinians of Gaza, the book in question gains heightened significance. Against a backdrop where global audiences are witnessing real-time, genocidal actions by Israel against the Palestinians, contextualizing these horrific events is crucial. An in-depth understanding of the current reality and potential future trajectories requires addressing the root causes and factors that shaped the interaction between the colonizer and the colonized, leading to a highly repressive and unbearable status quo that exploded on the 7th of October 2023. Palestine: Matters of Justice and Truth provides much-needed and timely answers.