Steph | bookedinsaigon’s Reviews > Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal > Status Update

Gahhh, SO good. I used to think Chapter 7 was my least favorite chapter (because it was the longest), but it turns out there is not just one key theme, but THREE, that he covers in it to aplomb.

Inching ever closer to full absorption of El-Kurd’s many powerful ideas here.

Colonial logic: The colonizer is an individual who bears no responsibility for the crimes of his ancestors. Meanwhile, each colonial subject is the representative of his entire population, and thus held accountable for everything every one of them does, at a much higher standard than the colonizer and with a far lower threshold for so-called “missteps.”

EVERYTHING on pages 84-85. I need to study these again and again and again.

It’s striking me all over again what a catch-22 this book is. Because El-Kurd HAD to play the politics of appeal in his book in order to be read and heard. I can only imagine the inner turmoil he experienced during this project.

Even better the second time around. Every line is poetry and truth.

“The rallying cry that ‘We are all Palestinians’ must abandon the metaphor and manifest materially. Meaning, all of us—Palestinians or otherwise—must embody the Palestinian condition, the condition of resistance and refusal, in the lives we lead and the company we keep.”

Omar El-Akkad and the National Book Award judging committee really need to read pages 151-169, which is about the racism that underpins Western institutions’ patterns of elevating non-Palestinian voices over Palestinian ones when talking about Palestine.