Summary
Scholar whose essay in the 2018 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East forum “Palestine: Doing Things with Archives” traces her great-grandfather Naim Coltran’s dispossession through familial archives and names an “epistemology of shame” (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.162-163).
Details
- Coltran’s orchards and bank accounts were expropriated through the Absentee Property Law; despite his fluency and status “Naim faltered in the face” of a bureaucratic structure that intended, in Seikaly’s words, “to exclude and deprive him at every turn”, petitioning until his death for remuneration; Seikaly also grapples with moments when he sold property to the Jewish National Fund and the conditions that led him to do so (PDF p.162-163).
- Her epistemology of shame “determines what stories we erase”: “At the base of this epistemology of shame”, she continues, “is the directive that Palestinians must repeatedly evidence their worthiness” (PDF p.163).
- Kelly reads the essay as demanding a future in which Palestinians do not have to repeatedly evidence worthiness for the state, its technologies of rule, or archivists, readers and scholars — a nuance tours can flatten (PDF p.163).
Related pages
Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Absentee Property Law, Epistemic Violence, Zochrot