In noting that Joseph Massad's identity as a Palestinian Jordanian should be central to any critical evaluation of Colonial Effects, I am taking seriously his claim that writing the book entailed, for him, a gradual “coming to terms” with this identity. I am also reapplying Massad's own interpretive method. “Throughout the book,” he tells us, “you will notice that I identify the geographic origins and the religious and ethnic backgrounds of people. This is done deliberately” (p. 16). Why? Because such specificity is needed to “interrogate” the claims people make about “Jordanian national identity and Jordanian national culture” (p. 16). I find it bizarre that Massad would cry “foul” when I conclude that his own (self-announced) “subject position” influenced his thinking on these topics.

In a move that suggests misrecognition and reflexive panic, Massad tries to recast my observations as a grand struggle between exemplary Orientalist and exemplary Other. It is a powerful motif; it is also a fantasy. If I disagree with Massad on many points, this does not mean I am treating him like a “native,” nor does it mean that I think I am more objective than he is because I am an “outsider.” There are many Jordanians who read Massad's book as I do, and this is hardly because they are “outsiders” or “Western scholars,” and even less because they do or do not consider themselves “objective.” These terms shaped Massad's reaction to my review, but not my reading of his book. Likewise, I never said (nor did it occur to me) that Massad's work is not scholarship. The latter is a genre “outsiders” and “natives,” and certainly “Palestinian Jordanians,” are all equally capable of.

As for Massad's characterizations of my own work—a bonus feature of his letter—I see little point in responding to them, except to say that my research is done among living tribal and bedouin populations. These are the Jordanians whose identities and “way of life,” Massad reminds us, were “destroyed” by the British, then appropriated by the state (and Jordanian nationalists) for use as a weapon against Palestinians. Given this model of cultural erasure and ideological redeployment, Massad is prone to fixate on those aspects of tribal/bedouin and Jordanian identity he finds delusory, threatening, British in origin, artificial, invented, politically ill-conceived, and otherwise “dissimulated” (p. 15). This analytical tendency is overdeveloped in Massad's book, and it explains why his claim that he is not about exposing “false consciousness” rings hollow. In fact, this critical, debunking agenda is essential to Colonial Effects. It is what makes the book incisive and (in my opinion) intellectually problematic.

For a fuller sense of what Colonial Effects is about, I recommend that you read it. My review, although shorter than Massad's response to it, is a reliable account of his book, emphasizing what I found most useful and most troubling about it, which is what most of us expect of this genre.