Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Reading for the Nation
- 2 Exile and Liberation: Edward Said's Out of Place
- 3 ‘Who Would Dare to Make It into an Abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti's / Saw Ramallah
- 4 ‘Israel is not South Africa’: Amos Oz's Living Utopias
- 5 Intersectional Allegories: Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh
- 6 ‘An Act of Defiance Against Them All’: Anton Shammas’ Arabesques
- Notes and references
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Reading for the Nation
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Reading for the Nation
- 2 Exile and Liberation: Edward Said's Out of Place
- 3 ‘Who Would Dare to Make It into an Abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti's / Saw Ramallah
- 4 ‘Israel is not South Africa’: Amos Oz's Living Utopias
- 5 Intersectional Allegories: Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh
- 6 ‘An Act of Defiance Against Them All’: Anton Shammas’ Arabesques
- Notes and references
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Rarely in the latter half of the present century has one come across so unabashed a recommendation that the world, especially the ‘Orient’ - Palestine, Algeria, India - and indeed all the races, white and black, should be consumed in the form of those fictions of this world which are available in the bookshops of the metropolitan countries; the condition of becoming this perfect consumer, of course, is that one frees oneself from stable identities of class, nation, gender. Thus it is that sovereignty comes to be invested in the reader of literature, fully in command of an imperial geography.
– Aijaz Ahmad (1992)It seems to me that one of our basic political tasks lies precisely in the ceaseless effort to remind the American public of the radical difference of other national situations.
– Fredric Jameson (1986)The two statements that begin this chapter mark the poles of a longstanding debate over how metropolitan readers can and should read literary texts from other parts of the world. Critics and teachers of ‘postcolonial literature,’ that controversial yet entrenched catch-all term for non-Western texts, have long been aware that their reading is part of an economy in which literature from the global peripheries is consumed by a readership that is eager for spectacles of violence and poverty set in exotic locales. Graham Huggan describes the dilemma concisely: ‘The well-intentioned desire for “adversarial internationalization” - for the fashioning of global solidarities in the continuing anti-imperial struggle - must contend with the power of a market that seeks, in part, to contain such oppositional gestures’ (2001, 10-11). It is tempting, in such a context, to refuse the category of ‘postcolonial’ or ‘third-world’ literature altogether, in the name of the historical and cultural particularity of the many different places and times that these terms evidently subsume. But this does not relieve us of the problem, since there is still such a thing as ‘third-world’ literature, ‘If only in the mind of the metropolitan reader of books’ (Brennan, 1997, 26). Rather than wish this formation away, we might instead address how it works, in its popular and academic incarnations: which texts it includes and excludes, what knowledge it assumes, and what kinds of thinking it does or does not make possible.
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- Information
- Rhetorics of BelongingNation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine, pp. 17 - 41Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013