Postcolonialism, profoundly influenced by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, has until recently been oddly silent on Palestine, a topic that not only preoccupied Said's thinking and writing, but also inspired his theoretical ideas on imperialism, anti-colonial struggle and the worldliness and affiliations of the text and the critic. This theoretical silence on Palestine was, in fact, preceded by a historical, political, geographical, social and cultural contestation of all forms of Palestinian spaces that include not only dispossessing Palestinians of their land, but also building apartheid walls, destroying hundreds of thousands of olive trees, appropriating/stealing traditional Palestinian dishes and clothes, silencing Palestinian narratives and the Muslim call to prayer. This paper will argue that these contested spaces necessarily become sites of Palestinian cultural production, struggle and sumud.
