[Book Review] Romeo and Juliet in Palestine : teaching under occupation by Tom Sperlinger

Abstract

In an interview concerning his autobiography, Out of Place: A Memoir, Edward Said (2000) expressed his enthusiasm for teaching what was then an impending summer school on the Memoir at Bir Zeit University in Palestine. He said that this was an opportunity to teach British and Arab memoirs in a manner that connected with what I would call, borrowing from Raymond Williams, a particular ‘structure of feeling’ in the context in question: an occupied Arab territory. In short, English literature was to be approached not in the conventional way of the English colonisers, who taught it as part of their civilising mission, making their subjects love a culture of which they could not be part, but in a manner that engaged the perspective of the colonised themselves. In Said’s case, this also involved contrasting British and Arab texts.