This thesis adopts a bottom-up, qualitative approach to Palestinian identity construction in East Jerusalem and asks how the new politics and altered geography of the city since Oslo are recreating Palestinian subjectivities and redefining Palestinian struggle. I make the case that East Jerusalemites are doubly marginalised, first as Palestinians spatially and politically dislocated from the West Bank, then as residents of Israel, inside the politics and economy of the state but permanently excluded from the national project. Distanced from both state projects and from the discursive structures through which Palestinian identity was constructed after 1967, East Jerusalem residents are redefining from below what it means to be Palestinian in ways that are unfamiliar to Palestinians elsewhere in the occupied territories. Drawing on the vocabulary and theoretical contours of discourse theory, I problematise the top-down optic favoured by mainstream academic approaches which essentialises identities and privileges an occupation/resistance binary. I suggest that a ground-level approach to everyday practices in East Jerusalem sheds light on the extent to which existing nationalist and resistance discourses have either lost or changed meaning for Palestinian residents and makes evident the complexities of domination which are not visible from an elevated perspective. I suggest that the view from the ground in East Jerusalem is significantly underexplored and that from this position, the assumptions underlying existing analytic approaches to Palestinian identity and struggle are called into question.

This thesis examines the work of two of the twentieth century’s foremost cultural figures, the Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said (1935-2003) and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), and focuses specifically on the formulation and representation in their respective work of the theme of identity. It explores the depictions of this concept in their writing; comparing and contrasting their personal viewpoints on the various facets of their own identity as Palestinian Arabs and cosmopolitan global citizens expressed through their chosen literary medium, prose for Said and poetry for Darwish. At the same time, this analysis of the creative writing of these two authors will serve to shed light on the complex and ongoing process which is involved in identity formation and maintenance, and conceptualization of the self. Said and Darwish’s multi-conceptualisations of self-identity take place in Chapter Three, which is divided into seven zones of self-identity. Their understanding of self-identity is observed through the spaces of their names, language, family relationships, friendships, ethnicities, nationalism, hybrid identities, and cosmopolitanism. The concept of post-Nakba and Naksa literature maps the critical developments in evaluations of Arabic literature and, more particularly, Palestinian literature. The understanding of Palestinian cultural context requires an adequate assimilation regarding the impact of Nakba and Naksa in Palestinian literature, linked strongly with the general impact of Nakba in all Arab literature. The thesis begins by establishing the major socio-political, cultural and historical contexts which shaped the lives and work of Said and Darwish. Then using an innovative theoretical framework which draws on elements of post-colonial theory Said’s own contrapuntal technique and close textual analysis, the thesis explores a number of key facets pertaining to identity construction which it can be argued are of particular relevance to the Palestinian case. These include trauma, collective cultural memories, displacement, the Diasporic experience and the dream of return. At the same time, the thesis reveals how whilst both Said and Darwish remained dedicated to the Palestinian cause they adopted a cosmopolitan identity which was reflected in their respective work and its identification with diverse groups of oppressed peoples.

This thesis examines the biographies and intellectual and cultural works of Elias Haddad, Stephan Stephan and Tawfiq Canaan, Arab writers who lived in Jerusalem in the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, a time when Palestinian identity was in a state of flux and when Ottoman, British and Zionist interests impacted upon Palestinian Arab society, economy and politics. Informed by ideas about colonial and postcolonial relations, the impacts of context and power on the development of texts, and theories of networks and entanglements, it argues that even in the absence of comprehensive biographical knowledge about individual actors, we can locate them in their intellectual and political environments. It also argues for the importance of using non-elite genres – including language manuals, travel guides and translations – in researching intellectual history, and for understanding debates and discourses within colonial societies. Drawing on my historical research into the lives of Haddad, Stephan and Canaan, and combining it with textual analysis, this thesis makes the argument for more diverse ideas of Palestinian identity than are often discussed for the Mandate period, and for the need to include a wider range of contributors than prominent intellectuals and politicians in our assessment of the discourses in play in this key period of Palestinian history.

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