Constitutive Absence? The Cultural History of Palestine in Religious Studies

Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine (1979) posed a raised which has yet to be answered by the liberal audiences to which it was directed: In what world is there no argument when an entire people is told that it is juridically absent, even as armies are led against it, campaigns conducted against even its name, history changed so as to ‘prove’ its nonexistence? This roundtable reckons with the ongoing implications of Said’s question for scholars of religion. Fifty years after he posed it, amid genocidal violence against Palestine that is itself underwritten by the erasure of Palestinian life and history in our academic discourse, we ask: How has religious studies figured Palestine in different contexts? Toward what political and intellectual horizons? With what stakes and consequences?