This article examines the cultural and philosophical significance of code switching in the formulation of diasporic identity in Edward Said's Out of Place (1999) and Fawaz Turki's Exile's Return: The Making of a Palestinian-American (1994). It argues that exilic Palestinian writers' use of code-switching pursues various purposes related to the multiplicity and plurality of voices to which they are subject, but it mainly pertains to the ‘exoticization’ of their homeland and ‘nationalizing’ their experiences in exile. Ultimately, the use of code-switching in the memoirs chosen here act as one of the most effective strategies that diasporic writers employ to satisfy a number of important socio-pragmatic and rhetorical functions that are usually expected in exilic writing. These strategies also aim to guide the (mainstream) readers’ affective responses to their work in the way(s) exiled authors believe best suit their rhetorical and national goals.

Inspired by postcolonial theory, this essay reads Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks as a critique of nineteenth-century US and European travel writers who recorded their encounters with Arabs living in Palestine, deconstructing the modern–primitive opposition that such writers assumed. Writing an indigenous travel narrative, Shehadeh seeks to write back against colonialist (mis)representations of Palestine and its people and to criticize the orientalist attitudes that preceded it. He disrupts, inverts and challenges those patterns of European and US travel writing. Thus, Shehadeh’s narrative sketches ways of challenging and questioning the assumptions of orientalist narratives that facilitated Israeli settler colonialism and aspires to decolonize Palestinian history and depoliticize the Palestinian landscape. This essay responds to the relative neglect of reading Palestinian literature as one of the postcolonial literatures that function as a counter-narrative to European and US orientalist hegemonic narratives, and not just Zionist colonial narratives.

This paper examines the allusions to Babylon, Sodom and the Red Indians in Mahmoud Darwish’s tribute to Edward Said, which he entitled “Counterpoint.” This paper argues that these allusions add a new understanding to the significant contribution of Darwish’s poetry to postcolonial literature. It shows these allusions suggest that the postcolonial narrative is an encompassing narrative that is continuously renewed and retold by meta-narratives by authors whose peoples experienced colonialism for two reasons: first, colonialism has never ended, but it continues with new shapes; and second, allusions in postcolonial literature aim at reciprocating “postcolonial solidarity.” This paper further demonstrates that these allusions gesture toward sharing the belief that indigenous stories and struggles are more powerful and rooted when waged together against the colonialist negation of the history and culture of native people.

Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistanceconfronts how Palestinians have recently felt obliged to re-thinkmemory and resistance in response to d...