Abstract
In 1980, Deleuze and Guattari coined important concepts in philosophical studies, namely nomadology, the rhizome, or nomadic rhizome, and deterritorialization. These concepts primarily deal with geographical as well as psychological displacements and are concerned with the nomad’s identity, boundaries, and environment that surround the self, continuity, and points of departure and arrival. Celebrating the removal of power and authority over a territory by its inhabitants, the deployment of these concepts weakens the ties between the displaced and land, between culture and place. These concepts embrace uprootedness and reject points of origin in particular as Oedipalized territorialities. Revisiting displacement does not totally reject Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a nomadic rhizome; however, it does reject what might be considered its inhuman and unethical character.
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- 1.
It is worth mentioning that “British” here stands for an open description of cultural and political identity: “British” is not an exclusively ethnical term, whereas “English” is a rather local experience and a racially exclusive one.
- 2.
It is worth mentioning here that the words Heim and Heimat are German concepts which broadly speaking mean homeland. But since the word long originated before the existence of Germany as a nation, it is usually associated with a region, district, and is distinguished by a particular dialect, such as Bavaria for example. A German therefore is connected to his/her Heimat by emotional ties as opposed to the political. Furthermore, Hitler once tried to masculinize the feminine term Heimat to serve his nationalistic ends: Vaterland.
- 3.
Mental and cultural ghettoization is to “forget that there is a world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers” (Rushdie: 1991: 19).
- 4.
It is worth mentioning here too that Jordanian occupation of the West Bank of Palestine ended by 1967 and in 1988, Jordan renounced its claims to the West Bank (with the exception of guardianship over the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem), and recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
- 5.
See Kaplan’s Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement: 1996: p. 138.
- 6.
See Du Bois’s The Souls of the Black Folk, 1994.
- 7.
See D & G’s Anti-Oedipus, 1983, p. 112.
- 8.
See Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964).
- 9.
According to Stuart Hall, a cultural turn is a
process [that] continues in the direction in which it was travelling before, but with a critical break, a deflection. After the turn, all of terms of a paradigm are not destroyed; instead, the deflection shifts the paradigm in a direction which is different from that which one might have presupposed from the previous moment.
(Hall: 2001: 9)
This suggests that while Palestinian exilic displacements always register a beginning, they are not necessarily ghettoized in it, and rather deflect from it as opposed to the Jewish one and its salvation through a physical return to it.
- 10.
It is worth mentioning here that neither did the Oslo Accords/Peace Process of 1993 nor 1995 grant the Palestinians statehood, nor did they cease Israel’s ongoing building of settlements. For further reading, see Said’s The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2001).
- 11.
It has already been clarified in Chapter 1, Section 2, that the concept of displacement is in part defined here within the context of the Palestinian displaced narrative and exilic experience of dispersions. The Arabic translation of the word displacement is Nuzooh. The latter is the noun that is derived from the verb Nazaha, which literally means to forcibly (e)migrate, to evacuate. Within the Arab world, this particular concept/verb (to evacuate, to be displaced) has always been particular and exclusive to the Palestinian experience after the Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948, which signaled the return of the Jewish diaspora and consequently triggered the mass Palestinian displacement.
- 12.
See James Clifford’s pluralized title Diasporas in Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 9, No. 3, Further Inflections: Toward Ethnographies of the Future (Aug., 1994), pp. 302–338. Clifford’s essay focuses on Jewish Diaspora and its return (as well as the Armenian and Greek) without any explicit mentioning of the subsequent Palestinian displacement. Written in 1994, however, Clifford does highlight the importance and the consequences of the PLO’s signing of the Oslo Accords.
- 13.
Palestinian and Jewish experiences of scattering are particularly invoked here in contrast because Palestine was a British colony and thus fits within the context of this project along with other colonial histories of the Caribbean, India, and Pakistan; also because Palestinian exilic displacements are ongoing and current. Furthermore, contrasting the two particular experiences here is partly because the historical context of the word Diaspora instinctively refers to and resonates with the destruction of the Holy Land that is Jerusalem: the center of the old as well as existing Arab–Israeli conflict.
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© 2016 Akram Al Deek
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Deek, A.A. (2016). Chapter 1 Writing Displacement. In: Writing Displacement. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59248-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59248-4_2
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