Orientalism and the Question of Palestine: Theory, History, Literature

Catalog description

Edward Said’s ground breaking work, Orientalism, was published in 1978 and soon became a founding moment for the field of postcolonial theory and a pivotal point of return within it. A year later, Said published The Question of Palestine. This was one of the first comprehensive accounts of the Palestinian condition as a stateless nation. The book’s explicit goal was to present the Palestinian story and cause to an American and European audience, with a special effort to reach out to Jewish American intellectuals. The seminar first task will be to highlight and explore explicit and tacit links and divergences between the two books. The goal is to identify two, not entirely compatible frames for studying “Palestine,” as a piece of land, a homeland, and above all a set of historically changing conditions of Jewish-Palestinian co-existence and co-habitation.