Dispossession; and the Consequences of Settler Colonialism: Palestinians in Salt of this Sea (Annemarie Jacir, 2008), Out in the Dark (Michael Mayer, 2012), and Omar (Hany Abu-Assad, 2013)

Intellectually this means that an idea or experience is always counterposed with another, therefore making them both appear in a sometimes new and unpredictable light: from that juxtaposition one gets a better, perhaps even more universal idea of how to think, say, about a human rights issue in one situation by comparison with another,” said the prolific thinker and writer Edward Said in “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals” (1993), collected in The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966 – 2006 (Vintage, 2019; page 378). Said’s book Orientalism (1978) considered how the western world saw the Asian and North African world(s), focusing on anthropologists and philologists, as well as painters, poets, philosophers, and politicians, examining the language used to describe lands, peoples, cultures, and practices, relating individuals to institutions, identifying essentialisms, illuminating prejudices, refusing mystification, and reordered a whole field of study. The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) examines classic texts with careful attention, and offered—with Said’s own rare eloquence—a critique of literary theory and practices, as informed by linguistics and the study of economic class and psychology, appreciating those contributions to knowledge yet seeing the adherence to theory as a subjugation of literature, as limiting references to the recognizable world, daily life, and diverse human experiences. Edward Said, like other Palestinians, was haunted by Palestine, by that West Asian land of plains, hills, valley, and desert, land bordering Jordan to the east and Egypt to the southwest, contested land; haunted by Palestinian history—by the United Nations Partition Plan of November 29, 1947; and the founding of the Zionist entity, the Israeli state, on May 14, 1948, a catastrophe (Nakba) for Palestinians; the 1967 Six-Day War (June 5 – June 10), after which Israel began to control Gaza and the West Bank; the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and much that followed—and yet Said, critical and practical, tried to keep alive possibilities for the future.