Not much in the way of new developments since I first wrote about the Steven Salaita story — the board of trustees has now, by a vote of 8 to 1, rejected his candidacy, and Salaita says he’s going to sue.
But in the meantime, I did find his dissertation online. Here it is: “The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Caanan.” This is imaged, rather than in html or another copy-able format, and I really only just started looking at it over the weekend, but if you’ve got time to spare and have been thinking to yourself, “I really want to get up to speed on jargon used in English departments,” now’s your chance. Take a look and let me know what you think.
In general, I’m not impressed with what I’ve seen. Of course, I disagree with his underlying premise, that the Jews living in the Holy Land a century ago were inconsequential and the waves of new settlers coming from Europe paralleled the European settlers coming to America, so neither of these groups has any moral right to the land they occupy. But from what I saw of the dissertation, he was all over the map in terms of his overall argument — but I didn’t make it past the rather long introduction to the “literary” part of the document.
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