The Return of the Marginalised: Palestine and Humanism (2011)

Document Type : Keynote Address

Author

Nottingham Trent University

Abstract

In her foreword to Patrick William’s 2010 keynote speech, “The Return of the Marginalised: Palestine and Humanism”, Pervine Elrefaei finds it very timely as we are living through the ongoing genocidal moments in Palestinian history post 7 October 2023. In his study of “the margins that matter” for the historical “urgency” they represent, Patrick Williams examines the question of Palestine, highlighting Palestine’s political, economic, cultural and theoretical marginalisation. Williams explores the cultural production and living experiences of three representative Palestinian “humanist intellectuals” who, in speaking truth to power, constitute acts of political intervention that deconstruct humanism as an imperial, Eurocentric, “exclusivist,” concept; namely, Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and the cartoonist Naji Al-Ali. Foregrounding the “Right of Return” as explicitly denoted in the title, Williams examines the mobilising role of such a “rich legacy” bequeathed by the intellectuals in generating hope for the marginalised to “‘return’ with explosive or subversive power.” The article drives the reader to revisit the concepts of humanism and marginality in light of the ongoing historical transformations.
Foreword by Pervine Elrefaei.

Keywords

Published in The Marginalised: Literary and Linguistic Studies, eds. Salwa Kamel, Hoda Gindi, Nadia El-Kholy, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University (2011), pp. 1-22. 

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