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Une Rose Des Vents Politique: The Southern Winds Of Jean Genet’S Poetic Compass, Joanne Brueton

Artl@s Bulletin

Iconoclastic French dissident, Jean Genet, notoriously channelled his hatred of the West as a way to discover the South. This article reads Genet’s admiration for the Palestinians as more than just a foil to the imperialist hegemony of a French homeland he reviled; but as a relation of equality that debunks the oppression of North-South dialectics. Tackling Éric Marty and Ivan Jablonka’s accusations of anti-Semitism, as well as criticisms of Orientalism, I use Genet’s 1982 essay ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’ to argue that his Palestinian texts radically re-orient the political compass where the North constructs and reifies a one-dimensional South.