Reconstructing Palestinian Identity Beyond Neo-Orientalist Stereotypes in Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost

Abstract

This article examined how Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost (2023) reconstructed Palestinian identity in ways that resisted dominant Orientalist and neo-Orientalist discourse and the stereotypes it has sustained in Western representation. Drawn from a larger qualitative study, the article addressed that study's first objective and research question: how the novel reconstructed Palestinian identity against Western stereotypes and Orientalist discourse, and by what narrative means it did so. The analysis drew on Edward Said's account of Orientalism, Hamid Dabashi's work on neo-Orientalism and self-representation, Lisa Lau's concept of re-Orientalism and Graham Huggan's theory of postcolonial exoticism. The findings indicated that Enter Ghost refused the binary categories through which Palestinians have conventionally been rendered, whether as victim or aggressor, terrorist or backward, politically unstable or silent. Instead, Hammad constructed identity through diaspora, memory, family, language, embodiment, place, domestic life, cultural participation and the difficulty of return. Sonia's position was central: her British-Palestinian inheritance made identity a matter of negotiation rather than straightforward reclamation. Her interrogation at the airport, her recollection of family history, her sensory encounter with Palestine, her involvement in Arabic cultural life and the differences she observed among Palestinians within Palestine each exposed the limits of externally imposed categories. Hammad's counter-discursive strategy did not substitute an idealised image for a hostile one; it restored complexity, contradiction, plurality and ordinary humanity to the Palestinian subject. The novel therefore reconstructed Palestinian identity as relational, historical, embodied, diasporic and continually in production through memory and self-representation.