Book Description
Ever since the appearance of his groundbreaking The Question of Palestine, Edward Said has been America's most outspoken advocate for Palestinian self-determination. As these collected essays amply prove, he is also our most intelligent and bracingly heretical writer on affairs involving not only Palestinians but also the Arab and Muslim worlds and their tortuous relations with the West.
In The Politics of Dispossession Said traces his people's struggle for statehood through twenty-five years of exile, from the PLO's bloody 1970 exile from Jordan through the debacle of the Gulf War and the ambiguous 1994 peace accord with Israel. As frank as he is about his personal involvement in that struggle, Said is equally unsparing in his demolition of Arab icons and American shibboleths. Stylish, impassioned, and informed by a magisterial knowledge of history and literature, The Politics of Dispossession is a masterly synthesis of scholarship and polemic that has the power to redefine the debate over the Middle East.
Customer Reviews:
A sad and dispriting commentary.......2007-04-26
Despite 40years of Israeli occupation, hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements, endless unproductive "peace process"-es, the Palestinians are no closer to genuine self-determination and nationhood. The Israel Lobby continues to wag the American dog. America's blind support of Israel and the billions of US taxpayer dollars continue to prop up the Israeli apartheid regime and make peace impossible.
It was hard for me to read these essays without getting angry: at the self-serving lies of Israeli apologists, at the cynicism of every US administration, at the sheer stupidity and venality of Palestinian leadership (so-called!).
Israel will never make peace with the Palestinians through negotiations as long as the US continues to subsidize Israel. Where is the incentive?
I fault Said for timidity in not elaborating on HOW Palestinians should prosecute their struggle. It is long past time that Palestinians accept that depending on their "Arab brothers" is going to get them nothing and nowhere. None of the essays helped me to understand how Said proposes to get Israel to allow Palestinian self-determination and statehood.
I also fault Said for his failure to mobilize any organized opposition the Israel Lobby in the US. Said may be much-celebrated in a certain small left-leaning ghetto of the intelligentsia, but he is a marginal figure in national politics and the debate (very little allowed) on Israel. The Lobby is powerful, yes. But the Israel Lobby does nothing illegal: it peddles influence and money and thereby influences politics in its favor, and nothing prevents a Palestinian Lobby from adopting similar tactics and emulating the Israel Lobby. The surest, perhaps the only, way to Palestinian self-determination is to change US policy towards Israel.
Excellent!.......2007-01-10
If all could read this book, it might help meople to understand what is happening to the people of Palestine.
Possession.......2002-05-24
It is remarkable how relevant these essays seem still, even as they lead up to the era of the Oslo process, in the frozen present since 1967, or 1948. Sorting out the myths of the Arab-Israeli conflict can be a full-time job, and that's the problem. Said's witnessing of the issues since 1967 has always been one component of the unfolding tragedy. The Arab-Israeli conflict sometimes seems in a time warp, and the relevance of these essays endures, whatever one's perspective. Said's acerbic commentary seems to hover over the decades, and his personal account, to start the book, is a permanent record of those who endured the juggernaut.
An Important Voice.......2002-01-28
Thank God for Said. He explains so eloquently the Palestinian cause in a way we never hear from the maintream media. This collection of essays, though 400 pages, hangs together very well.
A remarkable anthology.......2001-03-05
Edward Said's writings pertaining to Palestinian and Near Eastern affairs are always well-written, deeply insightful, and immensely compelling. This collection of writings, primarily dealing with the emergence of a Palestinian self-consciousness, was authored of the course of nearly thirty years. Not only does it provide a uniquely valuable historical catalogue of Said's thoughts upon Palestinian issues, it traces well the Palestinian self-view. Edward Said is, to my mind, one of the most truly complete thinkers alive today...his thoughts, be they upon literary criticism, culturalism, politics, or ethnography, scintillate...this collection is no different. For those wanting a, albeit ocassionally caustic, tracing of the Palestinian self-view and world-view of them, this stands as a superior resource.
Book Description
What happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people the tools of free enterprise as the means to well-being and empowerment. Schemes to transform the poor into small-scale entrepreneurs promise them the benefits of the market and access to the rewards of globalization. Markets of Dispossession is a theoretically sophisticated and sobering account of the consequences of these initiatives.
Julia Elyachar studied the efforts of bankers, social scientists, ngo members, development workers, and state officials to turn the craftsmen and unemployed youth of Cairo into the vanguard of a new market society based on microenterprise. She considers these efforts in relation to the alternative notions of economic success held by craftsmen in Cairo, in which short-term financial profit is not always highly valued. Through her careful ethnography of workshop life, Elyachar explains how the traditional market practices of craftsmen are among the most vibrant modes of market life in Egypt. Long condemned as backward, these existing market practices have been seized on by social scientists and development institutions as the raw materials for experiments in “free market” expansion. Elyachar argues that the new economic value accorded to the cultural resources and social networks of the poor has fueled a broader process leading to their economic, social, and cultural dispossession.
Book Description
Of all the interactions between American Indians and Euro-Americans, none was as fundamental as the acquisition of the indigenous peoples’ lands. To Euro-Americans this takeover of lands was seen as a natural right, an evolution to a higher use; to American Indians the loss of homelands was a tragedy involving also a loss of subsistence, a loss of history, and a loss of identity.
Historical geographer David J. Wishart tells the story of the dispossession process as it affected the Nebraska Indians—Otoe-Missouria, Ponca, Omaha, and Pawnee—over the course of the nineteenth century. Working from primary documents, and including American Indian voices, Wishart analyzes the spatial and ecological repercussions of dispossession. Maps give the spatial context of dispossession, showing how Indian societies were restricted to ever smaller territories where American policies of social control were applied with increasing intensity. Graphs of population loss serve as reference lines for the narrative, charting the declining standards of living over the century of dispossession. Care is taken to support conclusions with empirical evidence, including, for example, specific details of how much the Indians were paid for their lands. The story is told in a language that is free from jargon and is accessible to a general audience.
Customer Reviews:
A factual account of an incredible injustice.......2001-08-14
Being born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, I picked up this book to learn more about the Indian nations in our area after recently finishing an account of Lewis & Clarks Transcontinental Exploration. I was intrigued and appauled by the factual accounts in the book, and quickly developed an empathy for the misfortunes witnessed by the Nebraska Native American tribes. This book is full of information that I have not seen elsewhere, specifically about important sites, events, and people. I learned alot about the many names attached to towns, parks, rivers, etc., in the region, and plan to visit many of these locations with my children in the coming years. Excellent book!
Book Description
Despite popular belief, Native peoples did not simply disappear from colonial New England as the English extended their domination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather, the Native peoples in such places as Natick, Massachusetts, creatively resisted colonialism, defended their lands, and rebuilt kin networks and community through the strategic use of English cultural practices and institutions. So why did New England settlers believe that the Native peoples had vanished? In this thoroughly researched and astutely argued study, historian Jean M. O’Brien reveals that, in the late eighteenth century, the Natick tribe experienced a process of “dispossession by degrees,” which rendered them invisible within the larger context of the colonial social order, thus enabling the construction of the myth of Indian extinction.
Customer Reviews:
Just plain dull.......2004-03-13
Academic jargon and boring prose doom this short book from the beginning. The authoir has forgotten she needs to tell a story. Details of land transactions, of which she goes on far too long, read about like a phone book.
Dispelling the myth that Native Americans simply disappeared.......2003-07-26
Dispossession By Degrees: Indian Land And Identity In Natick, Massachusetts 1650-1790 by Jean M. O'Brien (Associate Professor of History, University of Minnesota) is a close and scholarly study of how Native American peoples from different tribal backgrounds came together for the purpose of working collaboratively to cope the cultural impact of European invaders, and to form a life for themselves even as English settlers extended their range of influence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dispelling the myth that Native Americans simply disappeared from the land, Dispossession By Degrees presents a carefully researched focus upon the Natick tribe and settlement that sought to coexist with an unending influx of settlers. An invaluable, informative, insightful contribution, Dispossession By Degrees is an original and very highly recommended addition to Native American Studies reading lists and American History reference collections.
Average customer rating:
- Great book!
- Wordy and Hard to Follow
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The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889-1920
Melissa L. Meyer
Manufacturer: University of Nebraska Press
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The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado
ASIN: 0803282567 |
Book Description
This compelling interdisciplinary history of an Anishinaabe community at the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota offers a subtle and sophisticated look at changing social, economic, and political relations among the Anishinaabeg and reveals how cultural forces outside of the reservation profoundly affected their lives.
Customer Reviews:
Great book!.......2006-12-13
Meyer does an excellent job detailing the complex history of dispossession on the White Earth Reservation during the early 20th century. American Indian history is often portrayed as simplistic; Meyer avoids this entirely and, instead, her meticulous research brings a story of diversity, deceit, and contradiction to life. This is a compelling tale of economics, politics, and social change. Meyer does not sugar coat the reality of the involvement of federal, state, and local officials in what is one of the most outrageous scandals in U.S. history. This is also a story of identity and how the U.S. employed race and racialization of Anishinaabeg as the ultimate means of dispossession.
Wordy and Hard to Follow.......2005-03-21
I set about reading this book for class. Halfway through, I was still confused about what was all happening, because it felt as though the author was writing the pages as they entered her head, with little orginization. A paragraph will cover several years of statistics, and the next will be about an entirely different decade, either later or earlier, or it will suddenly change locales without notice (white earth one paragraph, mil lacs the next, back to white earth, etc). It was also very heavily dependent on names, which also seemed to switch between christian names and anishinaabe names without notice. Finally, it felt as though a thesaurus had been dug out for most of the book, as the wording was often higher than would be used in normal conversation, which made you have to sit and think about certain words because you were unaccostomed to seeing/hearing them.
Book Description
Winner of the Margaret Mead Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology
The farm crisis of the 1980s was the worst economic disaster to strike rural America since the Depression—thousands of farmers lost their land and homes, irrevocably altering their communities and, as Kathryn Marie Dudley shows, giving rise to devastating social trauma that continues to affect farmers today. Through interviews with residents of an agricultural county in western Minnesota, Dudley provides an incisive account of the moral dynamics of loss, dislocation, capitalism, and solidarity in farming communities.
Customer Reviews:
painful descriptions of loss in the heartland.......2000-07-06
If you've ever gone through hard times and felt like the world was standing in judgement, you have a sense of what the people in this book went through losing their farms. I grew up in farmland and have some sense of how fully peoples lives were tied up in their farms. For all those who see the modern economy as cool darwinian survival of the fittest, Dudley offers up a more plausible alternative: failure is often arbitrary or--worse--prompted by poorly thought out policies. The resulting pain of failure for those who experience the judgement is profound because so many see failure and success in moral terms. I'm still mulling the final message--that the unsympathetic judgement of those who get the short end of the economic stick *is* the American way. I can think of some counter-examples, but for the most part it rings true. Curious what others think.
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Native American Testimony: An Anthology of Indian and White Relations : First Encounter to Dispossession (Harper Torchbooks)
Manufacturer: Harpercollins Childrens Books
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ASIN: 0061319937 |
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Promised Land: Penn's Holy Experiment, the Walking Purchase, And the Dispossession of Delawares, 1600-1763
Steven Craig Harper
Manufacturer: Lehigh University Press
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ASIN: 0934223777 |
Book Description
No issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict has proven more intractable than the status of the Palestinian refugees. This work focuses on the controversial question of the property left behind by the refugees during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. Beyond discussing the extent of the refugees'losses and detailing the methods by which Israel expropriated this property, the book also notes the ways that the property question has affected, and in turn been affected by, the wider Arab-Israeli conflict over the decades. It shows how the property question influenced Arab-Israeli diplomacy and discusses the implications of the fact that the question remains unresolved despite numerous diplomatic efforts.
From late 1947 through 1948, more than 726,000 Palestinians -- over half the entire population -- were uprooted from their homes and villages. Though some middle class refugees were able to flee with liquid capital, the majority were small-scale farmers whose worldly fortunes were the land, livestock, and crops they left behind. This book tells for the first time the full story of how much property changed hands, what it was worth, and how it was used by the fledgling state of Israel. It then traces the subsequent decades of diplomatic activity on the issue and publishes previously secret UN estimates of the scope and value of the refugee property. Michael Fischbach offers a detailed study of Israeli counterclaims for Jewish property lost in the Arab world, diplomatic schemes for resolving the conflict, secret compensation efforts, and the renewed diplomatic efforts on behalf of property claims since the onset of Arab-Israeli peace talks.
Based largely on archival records, including those of the United Nations Conciliation Commission of Palestine, never before available to the public and kept under lock and key in the UN archives, Records of Dispossession is the first detailed historical examination of the Palestinian refugee property question.
Customer Reviews:
Indipensable Road Map.......2004-04-04
If the Bush Administration is seeking a real road map to peace, this should be its basis. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is and has always been about land. Dr. Fischbach has done the world a favor by providing us the detail we need about what land was taken, and how sane and factual negotiations about its particulars provide us with a pathway out of the death and destruction of the past 50 years. Please read this book and hope our leaders do as well.
crucial book.......2004-01-07
This book studies the expropriation of the property of the Palestine refugees and the compensation issues and diplomatic activity that followed. Especially interesting (to me) is the discussion of the estimates of the dollar value of these losses. It is based primarily on the records of the UN Conciliation Commission on Palestine. It should be of the highest interest to anyone with an interest in the Israel Palestine problem and how it might be resolved. I must confess that I have only started reading this book and I am not a scholar- I am a lawyer- but I highly reccomend this book.
Customer Reviews:
Unhelpful propaganda.......2004-08-15
Christison is annoyed by those who think that Arab demands to acquire Israeli land are a swindle, based upon artificial claims of a specific Arab subnationalism that can be satisfied only by Jewish land. She argues, in effect, that people have a right to invent their own bogus histories and demand whatever they please. But she goes too far when she dismisses those who disagree with her as engaging in dangerous mythology "at their own peril."
Christison has argued for years that the key to peace is for Israel to negotiate with Arafat. Well, Israel tried her recommendation. It didn't work. There is a connection between Christison's poor logic and her unreliable conclusions.
Let freedom ring?.......2003-10-31
The book discusses the Palestitian problem from a Palestinian point of view. Even discounting some of it as too anti-Israeli, there's no doubt that the Zionist movement and later Israel dispossessed the Palestinians of their land. Israel continues a policy of denying Palestitians basic freedoms. We go to war to bring freedom to the Iraqis, yet we support Israeli policies that retrict the freedom of the Palestinians. Is there no oil in the West Bank perhaps?
illuminating!.......2003-01-15
I imagine that most Americans, asked for a modifying noun for "Palestinian", would immediately answer, "terrorist". We wouldn't necessarily think, Palestinian housewife, Palestinian poet or publisher, Palestinian professor, Palestinian student, etc. And certainly I hadn't been aware of the Palestinian-American community before I read this book. Ms Christison interviews over a hundred Palestinian Americans of varying ages and backgrounds, and, as I read, I grew more and more impressed, both by the strength of family and community the interviewees displayed, and by their thoughtful, nuanced attitudes towards Palestine and Israel. Please read this book! It is quite literally an eye opener.
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