A reminder of tomorrow’s Anthropology colloquium by Ron Kuzar, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Haifa
The Internal Palestinian Debate on the Right of Return: On National Discourses and Beyond
October 7th from 11:30-1:00 in ANSO 205
I will start with a (partial) lexical analysis of the term “return”. I will show how different meanings are selected in the internal Palestinian debate on the right of return between maximalists and pragmatists, and how reality is narrated so as to discursively harmonize with the lexical choices. Then I will present and discuss Anton Shammas’s short story Autocartography: The Case of Palestine, Michigan. Shammas (an Israeli Palestinian author, who writes in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, and is currently a professor of literature at Ann Arbor, Michigan) subverts, ridicules, and counters the whole debate from within, challenging thereby both the Israeli and the Palestinian national discourses from the vulnerable position of personal and collective hybridity.
Note: If you’d like to read the story beforehand, it has been reprinted in the Palestine – Israel Journal, 9(2), 2002, pp. 111–119. UBC Library subscribes to the Palestine Israel Journal online; you can find the reprinted story via here via Academic Search Complete.
The story also appeared in the the edited volume The Geography of Identity, available in print at Koerner Library.