• DOI:10.1086/430974
• Corpus ID: 154951084

Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation

@article{Makdisi2005SaidPA,
  title={Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation},
  author={Saree Makdisi},
  journal={Critical Inquiry},
  year={2005},
  volume={31},
  pages={443 - 461}
}

• Saree Makdisi
• Published 1 January 2005
• Political Science
• Critical Inquiry

“The fact of the matter,” wrote Edward Said in 1979, “is that today Palestine does not exist, except as a memory, or, more importantly, as an idea, a political and human experience, and an act of sustained popular will.” What I want to propose in this essay is that this complex vision of Palestine not merely as a place but as an idea, an experience, and a will—inexorably tied to a living people—not only animated Said’s work on behalf of the Palestinians. It also provided the conceptual and political foundation for his understanding of humanism as well as for his enormous contributions to critical theory and the field of colonial studies, a field that was inaugurated by his work on Orientalism. In distinguishing Palestine as an idea from Palestine as experience and will, however, Said recognized that the struggle for the idea of Palestine, though tied to its people and their cause, is somehow larger than Palestine itself, that it is a struggle animated by a sense of justice and a concept of humanismnot predicated on claims of ethnic, racial, or religiousexclusivity but, rather, on inclusivity and community. Precisely because it was born of the most brutal—almost literally inhuman—conditions, what Said identified as the idea of Palestine is a struggle for the articulation of a new sense of what it means to be human.