the pearl novel essay

Introduction to The Pearl

Summary of the pearl, major themes in the pearl, major characters in the pearl, writing style of the pearl‎, analysis of literary devices in the pearl, related posts:, post navigation.

• Ask LitCharts AI
• Discussion Question Generator
• Essay Prompt Generator
• Quiz Question Generator

• Literature Guides
• Poetry Guides
• Shakespeare Translations
• Literary Terms

John Steinbeck

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Social structures such as the family, village, and town, are central to The Pearl. The central unit, for Kino and Juana , is the family. Their daily lives and routines are organized around the family, and they make sacrifices for each other and for their son, Coyotito .

Outside the family’s hut is the village, which is small and generally comes together to follow and support Kino and his family when they are in need…

Good vs. Evil

The plot of The Pearl is driven by a constant struggle between the morally opposite forces of good and evil. Evil in The Pearl can appear in both man ( the doctor ) and nature ( the scorpion ); both evil man (the doctor) and good man ( Kino ); both ugly shape (the scorpion) and beautiful shape ( the pearl ). While the scorpion’s evil takes the form of lethal poison, man’s evil throughout…

Race, Tradition, and Oppression

Kino and Juana ’s racial heritage both provides them with the grounding force of ritual and tradition and deprives them of power under the reign of European colonizers. They continue to sing the songs they have inherited from their ancestors, but they also continue to be oppressed as their ancestors were, by white people like the doctor and by people with economic influence like the pearl-dealers . Their oppression is brought increasingly to light throughout…

Value and Wealth

The value and evaluation of material entities is a central theme in The Pearl . The value of the pearl , for example, requires reassessment throughout the novel: at the moment of its discovery, it seems to be worth Coyotito ’s life. That the pearl-dealers then so underestimate the price of the pearl reveals how distant the monetary worth of something can be from its perceived value, and how much value is determined by those…

Nature is a powerful force in The Pearl . Natural elements often serve to instigate crucial plot-points. Sometimes they protect (as in the plants that keep Juana and Kino temporarily hidden from the trackers) and feed (as in the fire that cooks the corncakes); while at other times, they destroy (as in the scorpion that poisons Coyotito and the fire that burns down Kino’s house). And throughout the novel, Kino is described as being, like…

• Quizzes, saving guides, requests, plus so much more.

by John Steinbeck

• The Pearl Summary

The Pearl , which takes place in La Paz, Mexico, begins with a description of the seemingly idyllic family life of Kino , his wife Juana and their infant son, Coyotito . Kino watches as Coyotito sleeps, but sees a scorpion crawl down the rope that holds the hanging box where Coyotito lies. Kino attempts to catch the scorpion, but Coyotito bumps the rope and the scorpion falls on him. Although Kino kills the scorpion, it still stings Coyotito. Juana and Kino, accompanied by their neighbors, go to see the local doctor, who refuses to treat Coyotito because Kino cannot pay.

Kino and Juana leave the doctors and take Coyotito down near the sea, where Juana uses a seaweed poultice on Coyotito's shoulder, which is now swollen. Kino dives for oysters from his canoe, attempting to find pearls. He finds a very large oyster which, when Kino opens it, yields an immense pearl. Kino puts back his head and howls, causing the other pearl divers to look up and race toward Kino's canoe.

The news that Kino has found an immense pearl travels fast through La Paz. The doctor who refused to treat Coyotito decides to visit Kino. Kino's neighbors begin to feel bitter toward him for his good fortune, but neither Kino nor Juana realize this feeling they have engendered. Juan Tomas , the brother of Kino, asks him what he will do with his money, and he envisions getting married to Juana in a church and dressing Coyotito in a yachting cap and sailor suit. He claims that he will send Coyotito to school and buy a rifle for himself. The local priest visits and tells Kino to remember to give thanks and to pray for guidance. The doctor also visits, and although Coyotito seems to be healing, the doctor insists that Coyotito still faces danger and treats him. Kino tells the doctor that he will pay him once he sells his pearl, and the doctor attempts to discern where the pearl is located (Kino has buried it in the corner of his hut). That night, a thief attempts to break into Kino's hut, but Kino drives him away. Juana tells Kino that the pearl will destroy them, but Kino insists that the pearl is their one chance and that tomorrow they will sell it.

Kino's neighbors wonder what they would do if they had found the pearl, and suggest giving it as a present to the Pope, buying Masses for the souls of his family, and distributing it among the poor of La Paz. Kino goes to sell his pearl, accompanied by his neighbors, but the pearl dealer only offers a thousand pesos when Kino believes that he deserves fifty thousand. Although other dealers inspect the pearl and give similar prices, Kino refuses their offer and decides to go to the capital to sell it there. That night, Kino is attacked by more thieves, and Juana once again reminds Kino that the pearl is evil. However, Kino vows that he will not be cheated, for he is a man.

Later that night, Juana attempts to take the pearl and throw it into the ocean, but Kino finds her and beats her for doing so. While outside, a group of men accost Kino and knock the pearl from his hand. Juana watches from a distance, and sees Kino approach her, limping with another man whose throat Kino has slit. Juana finds the pearl, and they decide that they must go away even if the murder was in self-defense. Kino finds that his canoe has been damaged and their house was torn up and the outside set afire. Kino and Juana stay with Juan Tomas and his wife, Apolonia , where they hide for the next day before setting out for the capital that night.

Kino and Juana travel that night, and rest during the day. When Kino believes that he is being followed, the two hide and Kino sees several bighorn sheep trackers who pass by him. Kino and Juana escape into the mountains, where Juana and Coyotito hide in the cave while Kino, taking his clothes off so that no one will see his white clothing. The trackers think that they hear something when they hear Coyotito crying, but decide that it is merely a coyote pup. After a tracker shoots in the direction of the cries, Kino attacks the three trackers, killing all three of them. Kino can hear nothing but the cry of death, for he soon realizes that Coyotito is dead from that first shot. Juana and Kino return to La Paz. Kino carries a rifle stolen from the one of the trackers he killed, while Juana carries the dead Coyotito. The two approach the gulf, and Kino, who now sees the image of Coyotito with his head blown off in the pearl, throws it into the ocean.

The Pearl Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Pearl is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

-other pearl divers

-rest of the people in village

What does Kino mean by, “This pearl has become my soul. “If I give it up I shall lose my soul…” Do you agree with him?

Kino allows the pearl to consume his life at the expense of everything else he holds dear. Do I agree with him? Money is nothing when compared with the people who love you...... absolutely not.

describe the setting of the novel "The Pearl"

The setting is a Mexican coastal village called La Paz, probably on the Baja Peninsula. The time is not mentioned although many feel it looks like the late 18th ot early 19th century.

Study Guide for The Pearl

The Pearl study guide contains a biography of John Steinbeck, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Pearl
• The Pearl Video
• Character List
• Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis

Essays for The Pearl

The Pearl literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Pearl.

• The Pearl versus The Secret River
• The Pearl: Symbolism Analysis
• A Dollar Cannot Buy a Smile: Riches vs. Happiness in 'The Pearl'
• Women as a Voice of Reason in John Steinbeck’s “The Pearl”
• An Analysis of Imagery and Mood in John Steinbeck’s “The Pearl”

Lesson Plan for The Pearl

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Pearl
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Pearl Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Pearl

• Introduction

• study guides
• lesson plans
• homework help

Introduction & Overview of The Pearl

The Pearl Summary & Study Guide Description

Whether by prayer, quest, or lottery ticket, humans have long expressed their dreams of a better life. Many are the tales about this phenomenon and, more often than not, the tales end in tragedy for the pleasure seeker. This longing for something better is the theme of John Steinbeck's 1947 The Pearl .

Steinbeck was disillusioned in the aftermath of World War II. He realized that none of his heroes— the GI, the vagrant, or the scientific visionary— could negotiate survival in a civilization that created the atomic bomb. Repentance, as attempted by his characters in his novel The Wayward Bus (1947), was not enough. Fittingly, he reflected his disillusionment through a legend about a man who finds the Pearl of the World and is eventually destroyed by greed.

The legend tells of an Indian pearl diver who cannot afford a doctor for his son's scorpion sting. In this anxious state, he finds the Pearl of the World and is able to get medical help for his boy Calculating the profit from the gem, the diver dreams of a better life—a grand wedding, clothes, guns, and an education for the boy. But his dream of leaving his socio-economic station leads to ruin. As he attempts to escape those that want to take the pearl from him, he is tracked by professional hitmen and tragedy ensues. No pearl is worth the price Kino and his wife pay, so they throw the pearl back. Their story is a warning to restless dreamers yearning for an easy or magical solution to their problems.

Read more from the Study Guide

FOLLOW BOOKRAGS:

Pardon Our Interruption

As you were browsing something about your browser made us think you were a bot. There are a few reasons this might happen:

• You've disabled JavaScript in your web browser.
• You're a power user moving through this website with super-human speed.
• You've disabled cookies in your web browser.
• A third-party browser plugin, such as Ghostery or NoScript, is preventing JavaScript from running. Additional information is available in this support article .

To regain access, please make sure that cookies and JavaScript are enabled before reloading the page.

Mobile Menu

• Find a Tutor
• Connection User
• Edit Profile
• Forgot Password
• Novelguides by Title
• Reports & Essay by Title
• Quotes by Author
• Novelguides by Author
• Ask a Question
• Novelguides
• Connections
• Reports & Essays
• Ask Question
• Tutor's Market Place
• How it Works

What are You Studying?

Novelguide rooms, novelguide: search by author, novelguide: search by title.

Book navigation

• The Pearl: Biography: John Steinbeck
• The Pearl: Novel Summary: Chapter 1
• The Pearl: Novel Summary: Chapter 2
• The Pearl: Novel Summary: Chapter 3
• The Pearl: Novel Summary: Chapter 4
• The Pearl: Novel Summary: Chapter 5
• The Pearl: Novel Summary: Chapter 6
• The Pearl: Character Profiles
• The Pearl: Metaphor Analysis

The Pearl: Theme Analysis

• The Pearl: Top Ten Quotes
• The Pearl: Essay Q&A

Good versus Evil The most prominent theme in the parable of the pearl is that of the struggle between good and evil. As is the case with most parables the characters and events of the story are rendered more definitely aligned with good or evil than would be possible to appreciate amongst the degree of overlap inherent to the real world. Throughout the story the songs that Kino hears in his head reveals to him on an instinctual level of a person or thing's true nature. Thus, the song of evil accompanies the Priest who treats the indians like children and the doctor who regards them as animals. The song of the family, or the song of life, accompanies the life-sustaining morning activities as well as the family itself as they flee from their pursuers. In Kino's conception of good and evil anything that threatens the family is evil. Thus the song of evil can also accompany natural things like the scorpion which stings Coyotito. The pearl, also a product of nature, is never clearly defined as inherently good or evil. Rather its effect upon the family is shown to be evil once it has proven to be a treacherous repository of Kino's dreams. Poverty versus Wealth The pearl's immediate and lasting effect upon Kino is to cause him to dream of better things for himself and for his family. Although the pearl attracts attackers and pursuers, Kino is determined that it shall be the means by which his family rises above their station and, most importantly, his son achieves literacy. In this manner the story is a political one. The story delineates and draws moral conclusions about the differences between early nineteenth century Mexico's poor, characterized by the sympathetic characters such as Kino and Juana and the country's rich portrayed using unsympathetic characters like the doctor. Family Although Kino begins the story with the "song of the family" coursing through his being, he is soon sidetracked by the desires generated by the pearl. Though these desires are for things that Kino believes will make the family stronger - a rifle, a marriage, education - It is Juana who struggles to maintain the family as it once was. Significantly, it is Juana who first suggests destroying the peal between two stones and actually attempts to free her family of its influence by throwing it back into the sea. She realizes that the family would have no meaning without Kino and relents to his desire to sell the pearl in the city. Just as the family is what drives Kino's desires, so does the sense of family bind Juana to his side when she refuses to part with him during their flight into the mountains. Once Coyotito has been killed, however, the family has ceased to exist and Kino can see that the pearl, contrary to his initial belief, has brought nothing but bad fortune. Fortune The operations of chance and the effort to discern good luck from bad luck in an underlying theme in the story. The pearl itself is the byproduct of a chance grain of sand embedding in an oyster. Additionally, Kino's finding of the pearl is depicted as the lucky moment of collusion of being in the right place at the right time with the right need. The luck that that the pearl brings Kino's family, however, is revealed to be bad luck when his attempt to sell it at a fair price leads to the death of his only son.

• Facebook share

Top Novelguides

Quotes by topic, report & essay.

• Thomas Jefferson: the Man, the Myth, and the Morality
• JFK: His Life and Legacy
• Gerald Ford
• Harry Shippe Truman
• Herbert Hoover
• The Presidency of FDR
• J.F.K. Biography
• James Madison

Popular Novelguides

• To Kill A Mockingbird Discuss & QA
• The Great Gatsby Discuss & QA
• Lord of the Flies Discuss & QA
• Adventures of Huck Finn Discuss & QA
• The Catcher in the Rye Discuss & QA
• Animal Farm Discuss & QA
• 1984 Discuss & QA
• Fahrenheit 451 Discuss & QA
• Odysseus Discuss & QA
• Great Expectations Discuss & QA

William Shakespeare Novels

Quotes: search by author, search reports and essays.

Novelguide.com is the premier free source for literary analysis on the web. We provide an educational supplement for better understanding of classic and contemporary literature. Novelguide.com is continually in the process of adding more books to the website each week. Please check back weekly to see what we have added. Please let us know if you have any suggestions or comments or would like any additional information. Thanks for checking out our website. More Details

Our Networks

• novelguide.com
• studyhall.novelguide.com
• Homework Help
• flashcard.novelguide.com/
• video.novelguide.com
• Share Report & Essay
• Join a school
• Join a teacher group
• Test Prep Material

Useful Links

• See what's new on our blog
• All Question
• Novelguide Authors
• Search Your School
• Teacher ratings

• Entertainment
• Environment
• Information Science and Technology
• Social Issues

Home Essay Samples Literature

Essay Samples on The Pearl

Imagery and character analysis in the pearl.

In the very beginning of the book, Kino watches as his son, Coyotio sleeps. While he is sleeping, Coyotito is stung by a scorpion despite Kino’s efforts to catch it and kill it. They go to the doctor to get Kino treated for the sting...

• Character Analysis
• Imagery in Literature

The Theme Of Group Behavior In The Pearl By John Steinbeck

The article is a study exploring the pattern of group activity in John The Pearl's novel. There's a major influence on other individuals from Stein show group behavior. We are the long-term basis of human life. Steinbeck's group-man theory is based on Darwinian interpretation of...

• John Steinbeck

Theme of Greed in John Steinbeck’s Novel The Pearl and Jack London's Story A Piece of Steak

In John Steinbeck’s realistic fiction novel, The Pearl, Kino drastically changes his life when he finds a pearl of great value. Local authors, Jack London and John Steinbeck, both use greed, murder, and poverty in different ways to express their themes. Greed is a theme...

John Steinbeck's The Pearl Through the Prism of New Formalism

Using the New Formalism as a lens to analyze Pearls, the reader can see that Steinbeck uses images, symbols and music to develop a theme according to which luck can lead people with good intentions to the path of evil and negative. In modern society,...

• The New Deal

John Steinbeck: Literary Works, Life and People Who Inspired Him

Recurring Ideas in Of Mice and Men, Travels With Charley, and The Pearl The Desire to Escape One recurring theme that is displayed in Of Mice and Men, Travels With Charley, and The Pearl is the desire to escape, which causes the characters to venture...

• Literature Review

Stressed out with your paper?

Consider using writing assistance:

• 100% unique papers
• 3 hrs deadline option

Best topics on The Pearl

1. Imagery And Character Analysis In The Pearl

2. The Theme Of Group Behavior In The Pearl By John Steinbeck

3. Theme of Greed in John Steinbeck’s Novel The Pearl and Jack London’s Story A Piece of Steak

4. John Steinbeck’s The Pearl Through the Prism of New Formalism

5. John Steinbeck: Literary Works, Life and People Who Inspired Him

• Hidden Intellectualism
• A Raisin in The Sun
• William Shakespeare
• Sonny's Blues

Need writing help?

You can always rely on us no matter what type of paper you need

*No hidden charges

100% Unique Essays

Absolutely Confidential

Money Back Guarantee

By clicking “Send Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails

You can also get a UNIQUE essay on this or any other topic

Thank you! We’ll contact you as soon as possible.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — John Steinbeck — The Pearl Theme Analysis

The Pearl Theme Analysis

• Categories: John Steinbeck Novel The Pearl

About this sample

Words: 419 |

Published: Nov 16, 2018

Words: 419 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr. Heisenberg

Verified writer

• Expert in: Literature

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

5 pages / 2462 words

2 pages / 827 words

4 pages / 1723 words

3 pages / 1428 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

In conclusion, John Steinbeck's writings on the Great Depression offer a profound and empathetic exploration of the era's challenges and hardships. His novels, such as "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Of Mice and Men," provide a deep [...]

Bloom, H. (Ed.). (2003). John Steinbeck's "The Pearl". Infobase Publishing.Campbell, M. (2016). Greed in John Steinbeck's "The Pearl". The Explicator, 74(2), 122-124.Davis, R. L. (2015). John Steinbeck's "The Pearl" and His [...]

The historical fiction novel, Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck is about the journey of two friends George Milton and Lennie Small. The book takes place a few miles south of Soledad at the Salinas River. George and Lennie go to [...]

Novella "Of Mice and Men" is a classic piece of literature that delves into the lives of migrant workers during the Great Depression. One of the pivotal characters in the story is Curley's wife, who is often misunderstood and [...]

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck introduces a family rooted in the leadership of men. The journey of hardship they endure, however, disintegrates this patriarchal control, leaving the women, Ma specifically, to take charge. [...]

Adams, J. T. (1931). The Epic of America. Little, Brown, and Company.Bellamy, E. (1888). Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Ticknor and Company.Dixon, T. (2015). The Essential America: Our Founders and the Liberal Tradition. Pelican [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism

The rise of an academic theory and its obsession with Israel

O n October 7 , Hamas killed four times as many Israelis in a single day as had been killed in the previous 15 years of conflict. In the months since, protesters have rallied against Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. But a new tone of excitement and enthusiasm could be heard among pro-Palestinian activists from the moment that news of the attacks arrived, well before the Israeli response began. Celebrations of Hamas’s exploits are familiar sights in Gaza and the West Bank, Cairo and Damascus; this time, they spread to elite college campuses, where Gaza-solidarity encampments became ubiquitous this past spring. Why?

The answer is that, long before October 7, the Palestinian struggle against Israel had become widely understood by academic and progressive activists as the vanguard of a global battle against settler colonialism, a struggle also waged in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries created by European settlement. In these circles, Palestine was transformed into a standard reference point for every kind of social wrong, even those that seem to have no connection to the Middle East.

One of the most striking things about the ideology of settler colonialism is the central role played by Israel, which is often paired with the U.S. as the most important example of settler colonialism’s evils. Many Palestinian writers and activists have adopted this terminology. In his 2020 book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine , the historian Rashid Khalidi writes that the goal of Zionism was to create a “white European settler colony.” For the Palestinian intellectual Joseph Massad, Israel is a product of “European Jewish Settler-Colonialism,” and the “liberation” referred to in the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization is “liberation from Settler-Colonialism.”

Western activists and academics have leaned heavily on the idea. Opposition to building an oil pipeline under a Sioux reservation was like the Palestinian cause in that it “makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-­colonial regimes.” When the city of Toronto evicted a homeless encampment from a park, it was like Palestine because both are examples of “ethnic cleansing” and “colonial ‘domicide,’ making Indigenous people homeless on their homelands.” Health problems among Native Americans can be understood in terms of Palestine, because the “hyper-­visible Palestine case …  provides a unique temporal lens for understanding settler colonial health determinants more broadly.” Pollution, too, can be understood through a Palestinian lens, according to the British organization Friends of the Earth, because Palestine demonstrates that “the world is an unequal place” where “marginalised and vulnerable people bear the brunt of injustice.”

Although Israel fails in obvious ways to fit the model of settler colonialism, it has become the standard reference point because it offers theorists and activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state “between the river and the sea.” In the contemporary world, only in Israel can the fight against settler colonialism move from theory to practice.

T he concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., as a way of linking social evils in these countries today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement. In the past decade, settler colonialism has become one of the most important concepts in the academic humanities, the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of papers, as well as college courses on topics such as U.S. history, public health, and gender studies.

Read: The curious rise of settler colonialism and Turtle Island

For the academic field of settler-colonial studies, the settlement process is characterized by European settlers discovering a land that they consider “terra nullius,” the legal property of no one; their insatiable hunger for expansion that fills an entire continent; and the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures. This model, drawn from the history of Anglophone colonies such as the U.S. and Australia, is regularly applied to the history of Israel even though it does not include any of these hallmarks.

When modern Zionist settlement in what is now Israel began in the 1880s, Palestine was a province of the Ottoman empire, and after World War I, it was ruled by the British under a mandate from the League of Nations. Far from being “no one’s land,” Jews could settle there only with the permission of an imperial government, and when that permission was withdrawn—­as it fatefully was in 1939, when the British sharply limited Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust—they had no recourse. Far from expanding to fill a continent, as in North America and Australia, the state of Israel today is about the size of New Jersey. The language, culture, and religion of the Arab peoples remain overwhelmingly dominant: 76 years after Israel was founded, it is still the only Jewish country in the region, among 22 Arab countries, from Morocco to Iraq.

Most important, the Jewish state did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine, though it did displace many of them. Here the comparison between European settlement in North America and Jewish settlement in Israel is especially inapt. In the decades after Europeans arrived in Massachusetts, the Native American population of New England declined from about 140,000 to 10,000, by one estimate . In the decades after 1948, the Arab population of historic Palestine more than quintupled, from about 1.4 million to about 7.4 million. The persistence of the conflict in Israel-Palestine is due precisely to the coexistence of two peoples in the same land—­as opposed to the classic sites of settler colonialism, where European settlers decimated Native peoples.

In the 21st century, the clearest examples of ongoing settler colonialism can probably be found in China. In 2023, the United Nations Human Rights office reported that the Chinese government had compelled nearly 1 million Tibetan children to attend residential schools “aimed at assimilating Tibetan people culturally, religiously and linguistically.” Forcing the next generation of Tibetans to speak Mandarin is part of a long-­term effort to Sinicize the region, which also includes encouraging Han Chinese to settle there and prohibiting public displays of traditional Buddhist faith.

China has mounted a similar campaign against the Uyghur people in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. Since 2017, more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims have been detained in what the Chinese government calls vocational training centers, which other countries describe as detention or reeducation camps. The government is also seeking to bring down Uyghur birth rates through mass sterilization and involuntary birth control.

These campaigns include every element of settler colonialism as defined by academic theorists. They aim to replace an existing people and culture with a new one imported from the imperial metropole, using techniques frequently described as genocidal in the context of North American history. Tibet’s residential schools are a tool of forced assimilation, like the ones established for Native American children in Canada and the United States in the 19th century. And some scholars of settler colonialism have drawn these parallels, acknowledging, in the words of the anthropologist Carole McGranahan, “that an imperial formation is as likely to be Chinese, communist, and of the twentieth or twenty-­first centuries as it is to be English, capitalist, and of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.”

Yet Tibet and Xinjiang—­like India’s rule in Kashmir, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999—­occupy a tiny fraction of the space devoted to Israel-­Palestine on the mental map of settler-colonial studies. Some of the reasons for this are practical. The academic discipline mainly flourishes in English-­speaking countries, and its practitioners usually seem to be monolingual, making it necessary to focus on countries where sources are either written in English or easily available in translation. This rules out any place where a language barrier is heightened by strict government censorship, like China. Just as important, settler-colonial theorists tend to come from the fields of anthropology and sociology rather than history, area studies, and international relations, where they would be exposed to a wider range of examples of past and present conflict.

But the focus on Israel-­Palestine isn’t only a product of the discipline’s limitations. It is doctrinal. Academics and activists find adding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other causes powerfully energizing, a way to give a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract. The price of collapsing together such different causes, however, is that it inhibits understanding of each individual cause. Any conflict that fails to fit the settler-colonial model must be made to fit.

I srael also fails to fit the model of settler colonialism in another key way: It defies the usual division between foreign colonizers and Indigenous people. In the discourse of settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples aren’t simply those who happen to occupy a territory before Europeans discovered it. Rather, indigeneity is a moral and spiritual status, associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom. These values stand as a reproof to settler ways of being, which are insatiably destructive. And the moral contrast between settler and indigene comes to overlap with other binaries—­white and nonwhite, exploiter and exploited, victor and victim.

Until recently, Palestinian leaders preferred to avoid the language of indigeneity, seeing the implicit comparison between themselves and Native Americans as defeatist. In an interview near the end of his life, in 2004, PLO Chair Yasser Arafat declared, “We are not Red Indians.” But today’s activists are more eager to embrace the Indigenous label and the moral valences that go with it, and some theorists have begun to recast Palestinian identity in ecological, spiritual, and aesthetic terms long associated with Native American identity. The American academic Steven Salaita has written that “Palestinian claims to life” are based in having “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land.” Jamal Nabulsi of the University of Queensland writes that “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinian ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land.”

This kind of language points to an aspect of the concept of indigeneity that is often tacitly overlooked in the Native American context: its irrationalism. The idea that different peoples have incommensurable ways of being and knowing, rooted in their relationship to a particular landscape, comes out of German Romantic nationalism. Originating in the early 19th century in the work of philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder, it eventually degenerated into the blood-­and-­soil nationalism of Nazi ideologues such as Richard Walther Darré, who in 1930 hymned what might be called an embodied connection to Germany: “The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it … Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it.”

For Darré, this rootedness in the land meant that Germans could never thrive in cities, among the “rootless ways of thinking of the urbanite.” The rootless urbanite par excellence, for Nazi ideology, was of course the Jew. For Salaita, the exaltation of Palestinian indigeneity leads to the very same conclusion about “Zionists,” who usurp the land but can never be vitally rooted in it: “In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity … Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic. It is an ideological fabrication with fixed characteristics.”

In this way, anti-Zionism converges with older patterns of anti­-Semitic and anti­-Jewish thinking. It is true, of course, that criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-­Semitic. Virtually anything that an Israeli government does is likely to be harshly criticized by many Israeli Jews themselves. But it is also true that anti-­Semitism is not simply a matter of personal prejudice against Jews, existing on an entirely different plane from politics. The term anti­-Semitism was coined in Germany in the late 19th century because the old term, Jew hatred , sounded too instinctive and brutal to describe what was, in fact, a political ideology—­an account of the way the world works and how it should be changed.

Wilhelm Marr, the German writer who popularized the word, complained in his 1879 book, The Victory of Judaism Over Germanism , that “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.” That spirit, for Marr, was materialism and selfishness, “profiteering and usury.” Anti-­Semitic political parties in Europe attacked “Semitism” in the same way that socialists attacked capitalism. The saying “Anti-­Semitism is the socialism of fools,” used by the German left at this time, recognized the structural similarity between these rival worldviews.

The identification of Jews with soulless materialism made sense to 19th-century Europeans because it translated one of the oldest doctrines of Christianity into the language of modern politics. The apostle Paul, a Jew who became a follower of Jesus, explained the difference between his old faith and his new one by identifying Judaism with material things (­the circumcision of the flesh, the letter of the law) and Christianity with spiritual things—­the circumcision of the heart, a new law “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”

Simon Sebag Montefiore: The decolonization narrative is dangerous and false

Today this characterization of Jews as stubborn, heartless, and materialistic is seldom publicly expressed in the language of Christianity, as in the Middle Ages, or in the language of race, as in the late 19th century. But it is quite respectable to say exactly the same thing in the language of settler colonialism. As the historian David Nirenberg has written, “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel,’” except that today, Israel refers not to the Jewish people but to the Jewish state.

When those embracing the ideology of settler colonialism think about political evil, Israel is the example that comes instinctively to hand, just as Jews were for anti-Semitism and Judaism was for Christianity. Perhaps the most troubling reactions to the October 7 attacks were those of college students convinced that the liberation of Palestine is the key to banishing injustice from the world. In November 2023, for instance, Northwestern University’s student newspaper published a letter signed by 65 student organizations—­including the Rainbow Alliance, Ballet Folklórico Northwestern, and All Paws In, which sends volunteers to animal shelters—­defending the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This phrase looks forward to the disappearance of any form of Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, but the student groups denied that this entails “murder and genocide.” Rather, they wrote, “When we say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, we imagine a world free of Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-­Blackness, militarism, occupation and apartheid.”

As a political program, this is nonsensical. How could dismantling Israel bring about the end of militarism in China, Russia, or Iran? How could it lead to the end of anti-Black racism in America, or anti-Muslim prejudice in India? But for the ideology of settler colonialism, actual political conflicts become symbolic battles between light and darkness, and anyone found on the wrong side is a fair target. Young Americans today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews—because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.

This essay is adapted from Adam Kirsch’s new book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice .

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

About the Author

More Stories

When Poetry Could Define a Life

The Smartest Man Who Ever Lived

Subscribe to the PwC Newsletter

Join the community, edit social preview.

Add a new code entry for this paper

Remove a code repository from this paper, mark the official implementation from paper authors, add a new evaluation result row.

• INSTRUCTION FOLLOWING

Remove a task

Add a method, remove a method, edit datasets, ex3: automatic novel writing by extracting, excelsior and expanding.

16 Aug 2024  ·  Huang Lei , Jiaming Guo , Guanhua He , Xishan Zhang , Rui Zhang , Shaohui Peng , Shaoli Liu , Tianshi Chen · Edit social preview

Generating long-term texts such as novels using artificial intelligence has always been a challenge. A common approach is to use large language models (LLMs) to construct a hierarchical framework that first plans and then writes. Despite the fact that the generated novels reach a sufficient length, they exhibit poor logical coherence and appeal in their plots and deficiencies in character and event depiction, ultimately compromising the overall narrative quality. In this paper, we propose a method named Extracting Excelsior and Expanding. Ex3 initially extracts structure information from raw novel data. By combining this structure information with the novel data, an instruction-following dataset is meticulously crafted. This dataset is then utilized to fine-tune the LLM, aiming for excelsior generation performance. In the final stage, a tree-like expansion method is deployed to facilitate the generation of arbitrarily long novels. Evaluation against previous methods showcases Ex3's ability to produce higher-quality long-form novels.

Code Edit Add Remove Mark official

Tasks edit add remove, datasets edit, results from the paper edit, methods edit add remove.

How to cite a chapter written by someone other than the book’s authors

Unlike an edited book, where each chapter has unique authors, usually you expect an authored book to have the same author(s) throughout. Thus, citing a chapter of an edited book is common, but as a general rule, citing chapters from authored books is not. For authored books, the whole book is referenced , with specific chapters included in the in-text citation as needed. This is true whether the chapters were written by the book’s authors or an outside contributor who isn’t given cover credit.

When a chapter in an authored book was written by someone other than the book’s authors, your instincts might tell you to cite it as if it were from an edited book—that is, citing the chapter authors in the author position and the book authors in the editor position without “Eds.” in parentheses. Doing so could cause confusion given that authored books with chapters written by outside contributors are very uncommon. APA Style readers are so accustomed to the format for citing a chapter in an edited book that they might mistakenly believe that you are in fact referencing an edited book and simply forgot to include the “Eds.” component. Also, if you are using a reference manager, it may not allow you to omit the “Editor” label from the reference.

To avoid potential confusion, the simplest solution is to cite the book as you would any other authored book, which is a reference format that readers can immediately recognize, but to add any additional information in the text.

For example, here are example references and in-text citations for two authored books that include chapters written by outside contributors:

DeMarco, R. F., & Healey-Walsh, J. (2020). Community and public health nursing: Evidence for practice (3rd ed.). Wolters Kluwer.

McEwen, M., & Wills, E. M. (2023). Theoretical basis for nursing (6th ed.). Wolters Kluwer.

• Parenthetical citations: (DeMarco & Healey-Walsh, 2020; McEwen & Wills, 2023)
• Narrative citations: DeMarco and Healey-Walsh (2020) and McEwen and Wills (2023)

In the text you can clarify the unique nature of your source by crediting the chapter author(s) in your narrative and identifying the chapter number as part of your in-text citation. Here are example citations of a direct quotation and paraphrased text from a chapter in an authored book written by an outside contributor:

Direct quotation: Melinda Oberleitner distinguished between two different types of leaders: “Formal leaders are appointed by official or legislative authority. Informal leaders derive power through influence and, in reality, may be more important to staff or groups than the formal, appointed, or designated leaders” (McEwen & Wills, 2023, Chapter 16, p. 369).

Paraphrased text: Melinda Oberleitner pointed out that informal leaders, even if they have not been officially assigned to leadership positions, may serve a more significant role in influencing their coworkers than formal leaders (McEwen & Wills, 2023, Chapter 16).

The same principles apply if a contributor is credited as writing a smaller portion of a book, such as a text box, rather than an entire chapter. You would simply include the box number instead of the chapter number in your citation.

Sometimes outside contributors (particularly foreword authors) are given cover credit, typically as part of a “with” statement below the main authors’ names. In this case, the contributors are credited parenthetically in the reference. However, as with the previous examples, they are not listed among the authors in corresponding in-text citations.

Here are example references and citations for two authored books in which outside contributors are given cover credit:

Blume, M., & Lust, B. C. (with Chien, Y., Dye, C. D., Foley, C. A., & Kedar, Y.). (2017). Research methods in language acquisition: Principles, procedures, and practices . De Gruyter Mouton; American Psychological Association.

Christie, A. (with Todd, C.). (2013). Hercule Poirot: The complete short stories . HarperCollins.

• Parenthetical citations: (Blume & Lust, 2017; Christie, 2013)
• Narrative citations: Blume and Lust (2017) and Christie (2013)

If you are citing a portion of the book that was written by the outside contributor(s), you can mention them in text, as shown in these examples:

In his foreword, Charles Todd noted that the famous detective Hercule Poirot has no clear origin story and is therefore as mysterious as the cases he is tasked with solving (Christie, 2013).

Yarden Chen described “the high-amplitude sucking (HAS) technique, which is based on measuring variations in infants’ sucking rate and strength in response to different acoustic stimuli” (Blume & Lust, 2017, Chapter 13, p. 252) as one common method for measuring how infants respond to spoken language.

Chapters in authored books that are written by outside contributors are so rare that it can be confusing to know how to cite them properly, but hopefully this post will help you. If you ever find yourself in that situation and there’s something you’re not sure about, feel free to leave a comment below.

Related and recent

Comments are disabled due to your privacy settings. To re-enable, please adjust your cookie preferences.

APA Style Monthly

Subscribe to the APA Style Monthly newsletter to get tips, updates, and resources delivered directly to your inbox.

Welcome! Thank you for subscribing.

APA Style Guidelines

Browse APA Style writing guidelines by category

• Abbreviations
• Bias-Free Language
• Capitalization
• In-Text Citations
• Italics and Quotation Marks
• Paper Format
• Punctuation
• Research and Publication
• Spelling and Hyphenation
• Tables and Figures

Full index of topics

Advertisement

Supported by

A Memoir Offers an Insider’s Perspective Into the Pentagon’s U.F.O. Hunt

In “Imminent,” the former intelligence official who ran a once-secret program shares some of what he knows.

• Share full article

By Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean

Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating U.F.O.s and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were thwarting the effort.

Elizondo’s disclosures at the time created a sensation. They were buttressed by explosive videos and testimony from Navy pilots who had encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional inquiries, legislation and a 2023 House hearing in which a former U.S. intelligence official testified that the federal government has retrieved crashed objects of nonhuman origin.

Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. In the book he asserted that a decades-long U.F.O. crash retrieval program has been operating as a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he wrote, technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been retrieved from these crashes.

“Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species,” Elizondo wrote.

The book, “Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for U.F.O.s,” is being published by HarperCollins on Aug. 20 after a yearlong security review by the Pentagon.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Experimental Investigation of Thermo-Hydraulic Characteristics and Sustainability Measure of a Novel Multi-Fluid Heat Exchanger for Turbulent Water-Based Nanofluid Flow through the Inserted Brazed Helix Tube

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data
• Peer Review
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions
• Search Site

Almasri, B., Mishra, S., Mohapatra, T., and Bargah, V. (August 20, 2024). "Experimental Investigation of Thermo-Hydraulic Characteristics and Sustainability Measure of a Novel Multi-Fluid Heat Exchanger for Turbulent Water-Based Nanofluid Flow through the Inserted Brazed Helix Tube." ASME. J. Thermal Sci. Eng. Appl . doi: https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4066260

Download citation file:

• Ris (Zotero)
• Reference Manager

A Novel Multi-Fluid Heat Exchanger (NMFHE) deployed for simultaneous heating of water and space is experimentally investigated to predict its thermo-hydraulic, exergetic, and sustainability performance for distinct Al 2 O 3 , TiO 2 , and CuO nanofluid flow of 50ppm concentration of each through the inserted Brazed Helix Tube (BHT). The input parameters such as flow rates, helix tube diameters, and nanofluid types are varied throughout the experiments to evaluate their effect on output performance parameters i.e., Nusselt number ( Nu ), Friction factor ( f ), entropy generation number ( Ns ), JF factor ( JF ), exergy efficiency ( ε E ), and sustainability index ( SI ). The nanofluid ( NF ) flowing through the BHT is the heating fluid that simultaneously heated the cold water (CW), and air (CA) flowing through the outer shell and inner conduit of the BHT respectively. A distinct Nusselt number correlation for turbulent nanofluid flow inside BHT was developed, compared, and validated reasonably with the current result. For Al 2 O 3 NF at a Reynolds number of 5698 with a 1/2-inch diameter helix tube, the best results for JF, ε E , and SI are found to be 0.009, 0.72, and 3.53, respectively. Furthermore, for Al 2 O 3 and TiO 2 NF at a Reynolds number of 14250 and a helix tube diameter of 1/4 and 1/2-inch, f , and N s are found to be 0.0032 and 0.043, respectively are optimum. It is observed that the use of Al 2 O 3 NF, higher helix tube diameters, and lower flow rates all make the proposed heating application more sustainable.

Purchase this Content

Product added to cart., get email alerts, related articles, related proceedings papers, related chapters, affiliations.

• Accepted Manuscripts
• About the Journal
• Editorial Board
• Information for Authors
• Call for Papers
• Rights and Permission
• Online ISSN 1948-5093
• Print ISSN 1948-5085

ASME Journals

• About ASME Journals
• Submit a Paper
• Title History

ASME Conference Proceedings

• About ASME Conference Publications and Proceedings
• Conference Proceedings Author Guidelines

ASME eBooks

• About ASME eBooks
• ASME Press Advisory & Oversight Committee
• Book Proposal Guidelines
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Publication Permissions & Reprints
• ASME Membership

Opportunities

• Faculty Positions
• ASME Instagram

• Accessibility
• Privacy Statement
• Terms of Use
• Get Adobe Acrobat Reader

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account