"The Land is Mine": Elias Khoury Writes Back to Leon Uris†. Issue 4 (19th May 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: AlJahdali, Samar H.
• Is Part Of: Interventions. Volume 21:Issue 4(2019)
• Page Start: 551
• Page End: 567
• Publication Date: 2019-05-19
• Subjects: Khoury -- Elias -- Palestine -- postcolonialism -- settler colonialism -- Uris -- Leon; Postcolonialism -- Periodicals; 325.3
• DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2018.1547216
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1369-801X

Abstract

Abstract : This essay explores the architecture of erasure, physical and discursive, in literary representations of Palestine. Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun (1998; trans. 2005) is read contrapuntally with Leon Uris's The Haj (1984), with particular focus on the politics and poetics of settler narrative and counter-narrative. The study argues the case of Palestine problematizes the settler colonial paradigm as theorized by Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini. Hence, the focus, here, on a Jewish American novel instead of Israeli narratives serves to suggest that the Zionist settler enterprise is inseparable from US imperialism, and therefore challenges conceptualizations of a purely settler phenomenon in Palestine.