Where in the World is Palestine?

Abstract

Where is Palestine? Where is the place of Palestine in the world– not just the physical world, but the moral and imaginative worlds, the politically potent worlds we habitually identify as the colonial, postcolonial, or even decolonial worlds? When we think about "World Literature" or "World Cinema" do such highly theorized worlds have a place for Palestinian literature or Palestinian cinema without either contradicting themselves or else turning a blind eye to the truth of Palestine– and if they don’t have a place for Palestine then how valid are these categories that cannot account for a nation, a people, an emotive universe under military occupation by a settler colony in their own homeland? This essay is the examination of such a world if it were to begin with one Palestinian revolutionary writer, Ghassan Kanafani, and only one of his little stories, and how those who read and act and stage and safeguard the legacy of that little story are the building blocks of a real world that dismantles all the illusory worlds built around them to deny, to bracket, and to erase them.