ArabLit’s ongoing series on Teaching with Arabic Literature in Translation continues with a conversation between ArabLit’s editor and Prof. Joseph Farag, author of Palestinian Literature in Exile: Gender, Aesthetics and Resistance in the Short Story and faculty at the University of Minnesota.
Farag spoke particularly about his course “Palestinian Literature and Film.” For want of space, this will include only a syllabus overview at the bottom, although more details about the readings will appear in the collected series of discussions: Conversations on Teaching with Arabic Literature in Translation.
You begin (it seems) by simultaneously situating the discussion in history & questioning how histories are made, particularly histories in settler colonies. What spaces of wonder do you want to open up before the literary and film works are introduced? What groundwork do you think needs to be laid before throwing everyone into the texts and films themselves? What tools or vocabulary do you want them to have access to?
JRF: Throughout the syllabus we examine the existential precariousness of Palestinians. We begin by addressing the various ways in which Palestinians are denied to even have existed — from Golda Meier’s famous pronouncement that “There was no such thing as Palestinians,” to the infamous “Joan Peters Affair,” (in which an author by the name of Joan Peters, through a tendentious reading of archives and documents, claims in a book titled From Time Immemorial that there has never been a permanently settled community of Palestinians in the territory of historic Palestine), to more recent pronouncements such as Newt Gingrich’s assertion in 2011, while the forerunner in the Republican primaries, that the Palestinians are an “invented people,” – I could go on.