Contents

New York University Press eBooks · 2022-06-26

A Reluctant Eulogy: Fragments from the Memories of an Arab-Jew

Berghahn Books · 2022 · 2 citations

• Art
• Ancient history
• History

6 A Conversation with Rashid Khalidi

New York University Press eBooks · 2022-06-26 · 1 citations

Post-Third-Worldist Culture

2022-12-23

Feminist work within national movements and ethnic communities has not formed part of the generally monocultural agenda of Euro-“feminism.” In cinema studies, what has been called “feminist film theory” since the 1970s has often suppressed the historical, economic, and cultural contradictions among women. Notions of nation and race, along with community-based work are implicitly dismissed as both too “specific” to qualify for the theoretical realm of “feminist film theory” and as too “inclusive” in their concern for nation and race that they presumably “lose sight” of feminism. Macho culture is dissected and analyzed within the overlaid cultural histories, in terms of the need to revolutionize gender relations in the postrevolution era. Gendered racism left its mark on Enlightenment aesthetics. The measurements and rankings characteristic of the new sciences were wedded to aesthetic value judgments derived from an Apollonian reading of a de-Dionysianized Greece.

THE ARAB–JEW AND THE INSCRIPTION OF MEMORY

The American University in Cairo Press eBooks · 2022-10-18 · 1 citations

Disorienting Cleopatra: A Modern Trope of Identity

Transition · 2022-03-01

The split Arab/Jew figure revisited

Patterns of Prejudice · 2020-03-14 · 2 citations

In this essay, Shohat argues that the question of the Arab-Jew, in contrast to present-day ethnonationalist common sense, must be rearticulated as mutually constitutive categories, so as to address the complex imaginaries of both ‘the Arab’ and ‘the Jew’. Elaborating on her earlier dialogue with Edward Said’s account of the bifurcated Oriental/Semitic myth—one rendered as the Orientalist (the Jew) and the other as the Oriental (the Arab)—Shohat offers a genealogical reading of this gradual splitting, locating it prior to the partition of Palestine and even to the emergence of Zionism, and tracing it back to the dissemination of a colonial-inflected Enlightenment discourse. More crucially, Shohat asks where the indigenous Jew of ‘the Orient’, and more specifically the Arab-Jew, might fit conceptually within this split. Today, with the epic-scale reconceptualization of belonging in the wake of partition, diasporization and competing nationalist imaginaries, the Arab-Jew figure silently occupies an ambiguous position within the bifurcation. Yet a critical analysis of the Orientalist splitting that sidesteps the question of the Arab-Jew risks reproducing the fixed ethnonationalist lexicon that posits Jewishness and Arabness as irreconcilable. At the same time, this very ambiguity, Shohat argues, was already fomented with the imperial ‘translation’ of the Enlightenment project into a racialized idiom, now applied differentially to the Muslim and the Jew-within-the-Orient. This essay traces such representational ruptures back to the nineteenth century, examining various instances of what the essay regards as ‘the de-indigenization of the Arab-Jew’. To illustrate her thesis, Shohat examines the gendered imagining of both Jewish and Muslim communities within a relational and transnational comparative framework. Orientalist tropes such as the odalisque, the hammam and the un/veiled female had long been projected on to Muslim and Jewish women throughout the region but, with the emergence of imperial ‘minorities’ discourse, the exoticized Jew-in-the-Orient became the object of a gendered rescue phantasy, as vividly illustrated in Dehodencq’s painting L’Exécution de la juive. Rather than a document of Muslim antisemitism, however, the colonial visual archive inadvertently registers what Shohat defines as a ‘split-within-the split’, highlighting the novel formation of an ambivalent indigeneity for Arab-Jews within ‘the Orient’. Yet the aesthetic dispositions also inadvertently and paradoxically reveal an underlying, thoroughly syncretic and shared Judaeo-Muslim cultural geography. Here the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew reveals an intricate landscape of belonging that offers an alternative conceptual framework in which to discuss the ruptures prior to the grand rupture of partition, and to illuminate the post/colonial transformation that dramatically impacted the narrative of Jewish at-homeness within Muslim spaces.

2. Lost Homelands, Imaginary Returns

New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices

Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 101 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies

Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices brings together for the first time a selection of trailblazing essays by Ella Shohat, an internationally renowned theorist of postcolonial and cultural studies of Iraqi-Jewish background. Written over the past two decades, these twelve essays—some classic, some less known, some new—trace a powerful intellectual trajectory as Shohat rigorously teases out the consequences of a deep critique of Eurocentric epistemology, whether to rethink feminism through race, nationalism through ethnicity, or colonialism through sexuality. Shohat’s critical method boldly transcends disciplinary and geographical boundaries. She explores such issues as the relations between ethnic studies and area studies, the paradoxical repercussions for audio-visual media of the “graven images” taboo, the allegorization of race through the refiguring of Cleopatra, the allure of imperial popular culture, and the gender politics of medical technologies. She also examines the resistant poetics of exile and displacement; the staging of historical memory through the commemorations of the two 1492s, the anomalies of the “national” in Zionist discourse, the implications of the hyphen in the concept “Arab-Jew,” and the translation of the debates on orientalism and postcolonialism across geographies. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices not only illuminates many of the concerns that have animated the study of cultural politics over the past two decades; it also points toward new scholarly possibilities.