On the Decolonial Beginnings of Edward Said

This essay historicizes the formation of Edward Said's critique of imperial culture before the publication of Orientalism (1978) and examines how it framed the decolonial approach that made him world-renowned. Deeply influenced by the writings of Martinique-born psychiatrist and Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, an Arab tradition of anti-orientalism, existentialist thought, and the Palestinian national movement, the New York-based intellectual reconceptualized the idea of decolonization in the late 1960s in a way that shifted contemporary thinking on social relationships between racial difference and empire from the individual and interpersonal to the collective and intercultural. Through his deep historical, epistemological, and phenomenological digs into orientalism's imperial culture and its myriad ways of being, Said made it his antiracist mandate to liberate consciousnesses from Eurocentrism and empower the universalization of decolonization.

Map-Making for Building the Palestinian Nation-State

Throughout the 20th century, the rise of the Zionist national movement paralleled the strengthening of the Palestinian national movement. The struggle of the Israelis and the Palestinians over Palestine also manifested itself in the history of surveying and mapping, and their respective rights to do so. After the Hagannah looted the Survey of Palestine, the Palestinians were left with few cartographic resources. The lack of maps of their own weakened their negotiating position during peace negotiations with Israel. Yet, it was not until the 1993 Oslo Accords that Palestinians had a mandate to develop the territory under their jurisdiction. Their attempt to establish the State of Palestine went hand in hand with their effort to survey and map their territory. Consequently, in an effort to produce maps of their own, various governmental and non-governmental organizations produced maps for both building the nation and establishing a state. Logo maps of historical Palestine served to enhance national belonging; and cartographic reconstruction of pre-1948 Palestine retraced an Arab toponomy of the land. Concurrently, maps for building the State of Palestine delineated the territory in line with international law, strengthening Palestinians’ case for territorial sovereignty. Such maps are also vital for governance, land allocation, and development. The lack of territorial sovereignty, restricted access to aerial photos at a suitable scale (due to Israeli restrictions), largely donor-funded mapping projects as well as the lack of a national mapping agency, however, encumber Palestinian mapping efforts to establish a state, that could ascertain the rights of otherwise stateless people.

Roundtable

Delegations of Black revolutionary leaders to the Middle East were a prominent feature of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity at the height of the worldwide revolt against imperial domination in the decades following World War II. Though they never ceased, delegations have become a critical feature of solidarity practices once more. Unlike their historical predecessors, today's delegations are no longer organized in collaboration with the official organizations of the Palestinian national movement but between individuals and/or social justice organizations. In addition, the delegations are no longer unidirectional, as they now encompass visits by activists from Palestine and other “Palestinian geographies” in the Middle East to the United States. Finally, recent delegations have included one by indigenous youth to Palestine as well as several from the African continent to the Middle East. This roundtable, featuring leading organizers of recent delegations, aims to reveal the ruptures and continuities of a historical legacy. We intend for this roundtable to serve as an archive and a site of knowledge production.

The Arabic Palestinian Press between the Two World Wars

This chapter discusses the development of the Arabic press in Palestine during the years 1929–39, a period that saw the emergence of the Palestinian national movement in its struggle with the Zionist movement and the administration of the British mandate to prevent the fulfilment of the programme for a Jewish national home. The press played a critical role in this process, from its beginnings in the mid-1920s through a period of growing strength following the events of 1929 which peaked during the Great Strike of April–October 1936. In its examination of the development of the Palestinian national movement and its cultural and social characteristics, the chapter addresses the background of the growth of the press, the reading public, the operating political forces and the extent of press influence in the shaping of public opinion in Palestinian society.

The Fragmentation of the Palestinian Political Field

The mid-1960s saw the beginnings of the construction of a Palestinian political field after it collapsed in 1948, when, with the British government’s support of the Zionist movement, which succeeded in establishing the state of Israel, the Palestinian national movement was crushed. This article focuses mainly on the Palestinian political field as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the beginnings of its fragmentation in the 1990s, and its almost complete collapse in the first decade of this century. It was developed on a structure characterized by the dominance of a center where the political leadership functioned. The center, however, was established outside historic Palestine. This paper examines the components and dynamics of the relationship between the center and the peripheries, and the causes of the decline of this center and its eventual disappearance, leaving the constituents of the Palestinian people under local political leadership following the collapse of the national representation institutions, that is, the political, organizational, military, cultural institutions and sectorial organizations (women, workers, students, etc.) that made up the PLO and its frameworks. The paper suggests that the decline of the political field as a national field does not mean the disintegration of the cultural field. There are, in fact, indications that the cultural field has a new vitality that deserves much more attention than it is currently assigned.