Teaching Palestine

This article explores theories and methodologies for an activist teaching and reading of Palestinian literature, including Susan Abulhawa's novel Mornings in Jenin and Remi Kanazi's poetry. Based on student responses — empathy with individual Palestinian characters but not resistance to Is...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Pedagogy : critical approaches to teaching literature, language, culture, and composition language, culture, and composition, 2024-01, Vol.24 (1), p.47-70
Main Author: Schueller, Malini Johar
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:This article explores theories and methodologies for an activist teaching and reading of Palestinian literature, including Susan Abulhawa's novel Mornings in Jenin and Remi Kanazi's poetry. Based on student responses — empathy with individual Palestinian characters but not resistance to Israeli settler colonialism — the author suggests that empathetic identification, often perceived as a means of comprehending the other, instead blocks political and historical understandings. Building on Saidiya Hartman's and Lorenzo Veracini's arguments, the author posits the need for seeing the other through a Levinasian radical alterity (which he denied Palestinians), not through similarity. Moments when texts disturbed readerly identification were moments of activist potential.
ISSN:1531-4200
1533-6255
DOI:10.1215/15314200-10862985