Dialectic of Un/Belonging in Emily Habiby’s <i>The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Israeli-Palestinian border conflict has continued to shape discourse in border studies, playing up the various ramifications by which borders are legitimized and performed in contemporary times. This perennial conflict has also set the tenor of Arab literature, casting a distinguishing profile of literary expediency on the tradition. However, most border-focused criticisms of Arab literature, as well as the literary representation of the border issue, tend to overlook the complexity posed by the lived experience. Habiby’s The Pessoptimist situates itself within this complex dynamic of lived border experience, problematizing the question of belonging and unbelonging through the everyday realities of Saeed, the protagonist, and the Palestinian Arabs in the State of Israel. This research, therefore, draws insights from Nira Yuval-Davis’s theory of belonging to interrogate the dynamic experience of un/belonging, while paying attention to how the narrative foregrounds it as a dialectical mode of being. We argue that although the novel complicates the question of belonging and unbelonging, the analysis of Saeed's experience and that of other Palestinian Arabs reveals that these two existential situations are not so opposed, but can be understood dialectically as a mode of living following the divide created by the Israeli-Palestinian border conflict, which serves thereby as a new mode of belonging.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".