Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T19:25:31.454Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Laleh Khalili
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Get access

Summary

In a situation like that of the Palestinians and Israelis, hardly anyone can be expected to drop the quest for national identity and go straight to a history-transcending universal rationalism. Each of the two communities, misled though both may be, is interested in its origins, its history of suffering, its need to survive. To recognize these imperatives, as components of national identity, and to try to reconcile them, rather than dismiss them as so much non-factual ideology, strikes me as the task in hand.

Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate”

Discursive practices are not purely and simply ways of producing discourse. They are embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behaviour, in forms for transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them.

Michel Foucault, “History of Systems of Thought”

By now, we know the images that flicker across the television screens during CNN or BBC or al-Jazeera news broadcasts about Palestinians: mournful or angry funerals of martyrs; walls papered with images of young dead men and, now and again, women; poignant or proud commemorations of collective death spoken in the idiom of battles and massacres; pasts that seem to linger; exile that is not forgotten; histories of suffering that are declared and compared. We hear about a surfeit of memory. Some claim that this mnemonic abundance is the final bulwark against capitulation – or compromise, depending on where you stand politically.

Type
Chapter
Information
Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine
The Politics of National Commemoration
, pp. 1 - 10
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Introduction
  • Laleh Khalili, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  • Book: Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511492235.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Introduction
  • Laleh Khalili, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  • Book: Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511492235.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Laleh Khalili, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  • Book: Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511492235.001
Available formats
×