Edward Said’s Interlocutors in Portuguese and Spanish: Frontiers of a Futura Palestina

This article asks how Milton Hatoum in Brazil and Lina Meruane from Chile each borrowed from Edward Said (1935–2003) as well as crossed over into the United States where their intellectual and political synergies drew less interest than the provenance of migrant forebears. Each writer catalyzed and carried on Said’s critique of orientalism and commitment to present-day Palestine, though Hatoum’s father departed French-mandate Lebanon for Brazil, and Meruane’s paternal grandparents journeyed from Ottoman Palestine to Chile. To paraphrase Said, I suggest that the two highly acclaimed authors anticipated and speculated how migrant “filiations” can be supplanted by and lead to more global “affiliations,” namely in relation to Palestinian self-determination. This futura Palestina (future Palestine, in Portuguese and Spanish) emerges in their dialogues across print and digital domains as well as southern and northern hemispheres. Despite respective debuts some twenty years apart, Hatoum and Meruane, in connection with Said, point to a future Palestine that is about not only origin and return but also beginning and border-crossing.