About

Shir Alon is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on modernist literary forms in the Middle East, particularly the parallel developments in Arabic and Hebrew literature during the early twentieth century. Alon's work explores how writers in these languages grappled with the challenge of narrating the present, which often seemed incompatible with dominant literary forms such as the novel. She develops a theory of "static forms," literary structures that express a modern present experienced as stuck, suspended, or absent, reflecting the lived temporalities shaped by Orientalist fantasies, regimes of labor, and the violence of occupation. Through comparative readings of Arabic and Hebrew prose, Alon situates literary production within broader projects of modernization, settler colonialism, and state building. Her scholarship positions writers like Mahmud al-Masʿadi, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury, Adania Shibli, S. Y. Agnon, Y. H. Brenner, and Yeshayahu Koren as innovators and theorists of global modernism who articulate the present as a series of suspensions of modernity's narrative of progress.

Research topics

• Art
• Political Science
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• Law
• Philosophy
• Social psychology
• Linguistics
• Literature

Selected publications

• Static Forms

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2025-10-28

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  What does it mean to write a literature of the present? In the early twentieth century, Arabic and Hebrew writers faced a parallel predicament. Modern literature aspired to reflect the contemporary moment, yet the Middle Eastern present seemed incompatible with dominant literary forms, especially the novel. Projects of “cultural awakening” implied that Arabs and Jews were somehow inhabiting the present wrongly. Arabic and Hebrew writers found themselves grappling with the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of narrating the present—and achieved strikingly similar literary solutions to this challenge. This book develops a new theory of the emergence of modernist literary forms through a series of parallel readings of Arabic and Hebrew prose. Situating literary production in projects of modernization, settler colonialism, and state building, Shir Alon traces the proliferation of what she calls “static forms.” These literary forms articulate a modern present experienced as stuck, suspended, or absent, embodying the lived temporalities of Orientalist fantasies of origin, regimes of productive and reproductive labor, and the routine violence of occupation. Static Forms positions writers such as Mahmud al-Masʿadi, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury, Adania Shibli, S. Y. Agnon, Y. H. Brenner, and Yeshayahu Koren as innovators and theorists of global modernism, writing the present as a series of suspensions of modernity’s narrative of progress.

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• Feeling Implicated

  Cultural Critique · 2024

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  • Psychology
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Art

  Feeling Implicated Shir Alon (bio) THE IMPLICATED SUBJECT: BEYOND VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS BY MICHAEL ROTHBERG Stanford University Press, 2019 The short Israeli documentary Mirror Image (2013) is one of those films about the making of the film itself: for most of its eleven minutes, the director Danielle Schwartz sits with her grandparents at their sunny kitchen table as they negotiate the precise wording of a text that should serve as the film's basis: the story of the large crystal mirror displayed at the entrance of the grandparents' home. Surrounded by family photographs, this mirror reflects the images of anyone coming in or out. The mirror, everyone agrees, is originally from the Palestinian village Zarnuqa and came into the family's possession in the aftermath of the destruction of the village and the expulsion of its citizens in the Nakba of 1948. "Why can't we say that the mirror was— apparently, most likely— looted?" Schwartz asks her grandparents. They, in turn, argue for a "softer," more ambivalent term: the mirror was "taken." But it is uncertain who took it and when; in any case, her grandparents claim they had nothing to do with it. Negotiations continue until they reach an agreed-upon version. What makes this film so arresting? First, the tone. It's a warm but clearly tense intergenerational dialogue. Schwartz is not accusatory: her grandparents are evidently not guilty of looting the mirror— they got it as a gift from Schwartz's great-grandfather when they moved into their first home— nor does she indict them for enjoying the spoils of war. She only attempts to acknowledge, in a cinematic document, their material implication in a violent history. The grandparents, however, adamantly refuse to look into the mirror, as Schwartz asks them [End Page 165] to, and see themselves as part of a story of violence and dispossession. "It happened to the mirror," the grandmother says, "not to us." What is at stake in this refused recognition? What would have happened if the grandparents had agreed with their granddaughter, seeing the mirror as the trace of a distant yet still very active violence? Would it change the way they look at it, or the way they inhabit their home? The unspoken logic underlying their negotiations with Schwartz is that even though they are not guilty of taking the mirror, acknowledging that they do have "something to do with it," and that they are the beneficiaries of a violence that continues to play out in Israel's ethnonationalist colonial order, would deem them, in a very tangible yet unnamed sense, responsible. The contours and effects of such responsibility are the subject matter of Michael Rothberg's The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Implicated subjects, Rothberg states in the book's opening, "occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes" (1). Implication is a relational position within hierarchies and histories of violence and inequality, the inevitable fact of our often passive enfoldment within orders of harm. The Implicated Subject offers a conceptual definition and an analysis of this enfoldment's ethical implications. As a term, implication is conveniently middle-of-the-road, less damning than the legalistic "complicity" and less personal than the fashionable "privilege." Rothberg identifies it with a critical yet under-theorized position within our ethical vocabulary, a term that allows us to "enlarge our understanding of the actors involved in injustices" beyond a narrow legalistic definition of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders (202). Introducing the sprawling mesh of implication modifies all three of these categories: most immediately, it does away with the figure of the neutral bystander in favor of the subject always already embroiled in social hierarchies and injustices. Secondly, the concept of implication aims to dismantle the absolutist categories of victims and perpetrators, as it highlights the multiple and multidirectional involvements of any individual in oppressive or injurious structures. Rothberg brings the insights of Black feminist theorists of intersectionality to bear on distant historical sites and case studies: the [End Page 166] legacies of plantation colonies, South African...

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• The Writer Sweating at His Desk: Labor and Literature in Fatḥī Ghānim’s al-Jabal

  Journal of Arabic Literature · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art
  • Political Science

  Abstract Debates about the role of literature in postcolonial Egypt took place within a broader discourse on the mobilization of labor and the creation of a national productive economy. Reading the archive of early issues of the pioneering journal Al-Ghad , this article shows that Egyptian progressive writers in the early 1950s strove to define themselves as workers and literature as a productive endeavor. The article then turns to Fatḥī Ghānim’s 1957 novel al-Jabal , arguing that its depiction of a failed peasant reform project is a means of reflecting on the work of the writer and its productive ends. While nominally committed to a progressive ethos of productivity, the novel remains haunted by the specter of labor with no product, exertion that produces nothing, which endures as an alternative model for literary writing.

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• Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic: Hall of Mirrors, written by Nadia Bou Ali

  Journal of Arabic Literature · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • Philosophy
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• A Specter Is Haunting Poland

  boundary 2 · 2020-01-24

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  This essay assesses a series of art projects, festivals, and institutional spaces acknowledging Poland’s Jewish past that appeared in Poland during its first decade of EU membership. Identifying a recurring practice of making absence present and tangible, or more broadly a concern with Jewish ghosts, the essay examines how contemporary art practices peddle in nostalgia for a Jewish past as a mode of desiring a cosmopolitan European future. As “newly integrated” Europeans, Poles are caught in a double bind: on the one hand, their Jewish ghosts allow them to participate in European postimperial discourses of tolerance and multiculturalism; on the other, they remain haunted, continually eroticized and differentiated from the “real” Europe.

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• Dror BursteinMuck

  World Literature Today · 2019-01-01

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  Books in Review Dror Burstein Muck Trans. Gabriel Levin. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 416 pages. Dror Burstein is fascinated by prophesies of annihilation. His previous novel to be translated into English, Netanya (2010), was a meandering meditation combining a middle-class childhood memoir with contemplations of our planet’s place within the universe’s expanses. Family history merged with geological time, and the constant shift between scales and dimensions cast both into unfamiliar perspectives, simultaneously intimate and foreign. Drawing from a range of popular titles on environmental science, the novel is steeped with the prospect of looming environmental crisis and the end of human life on earth. Yet whether it is because of its longue durée perspective , which makes human life on earth appear like a minuscule happenstance, or due to Burstein’s reworking of Zen Buddhism ’s impersonal philosophy into his prose, Netanya makes extinction look holistic , preordained, almost comforting. Muck offers none of this detached, contemplative vision. Like Netanya, this novel is concerned with true prophesies of disaster. Yet here it is not humanity that is coming to an end but rather the city of Jerusalem, and its destruction is bloody, cruel, and painfully close, grating at the reader’s sensibilities . Muck is written with the urgency and wrath of biblical prophecy: it is a rewrite of the Book of Jeremiah, oddly transported to a Jerusalem that is simultaneously the city during the rule of King Jehoiakim (sixth century bce), the contemporary metropolis, and a dystopian grotesque version of both. Fake prophets ride the newly constructed light rail, Ba’al worshippers pass children through fire in the Sultan’s Pool, and the masses are kept entertained by the spectacle of the world’s largest bowl of hummus (one of many kinds of muck, real and metaphorical , overtaking the city), prepared in the upturned dome of the Planetarium. Burstein adopts the genre of biblical prophecy to condemn a society on a steady course of self-destruction. Rampant government corruption, nihilist celebrations of military power, and culture reduced to mass spectacle : these markers of our time appear in the book in grotesque yet immediately recognizable forms (though, strangely, the most dystopic element of contemporary Israel, the ongoing military occupation, is all but absent from the book). In Burstein’s rendering, the Book of Jeremiah is the story of two aspiring poets who can no longer write poetry. The first, Jeremiah , is bestowed with the gift of prophecy, which brings him nothing but pain and a ruined reputation. The second, Mattaniah, who had tried to escape his royal destiny by leaving the palace, covering his body with cuneiform tattoos and writing Assyrianstyle poetry, is nevertheless crowned king of Judea by the invading Babylonians. The two men, acquainted through Jerusalem’s gossipy poetry circles, continue to encounter each other in their new lives: Jeremiah prophesying the city’s destruction, Mattaniah trying to escape the inevitable catastrophe, but standing no chance against the Babylonians with their chariots and helicopters. Characters and plots, however, are not Burstein’s strong point, nor his primary site of interest. The narrative meanders: we get attached to a character, then lose him and move on to another. It is not clear whose DROR BURSTEIN the latter is a concise, colorful, and illustrated introductory history of Frisian literature, the Boutle anthology offers a more detailed approach that includes excerpts of texts with a translation in English, accompanied by essential information for sufficient context . An eight-page introduction provides the indispensable historical framework. The book contains a selection of around 140 entries in a compact layout. Though Frisian and English were originally closely related, over the course of centuries both languages developed in a completely opposite direction. The anthology tells the story of the Frisian language, its speakers, and its literature, illustrated by Frisian sources but also by outside sources in languages like Dutch and Latin. The first entry starts with the arrival of English missionaries and offers an excerpt of the biography of Liudger, the first missionary bishop of ethnic Frisian origin. He miraculously cured the blind Frisian singer Bernlef (ca. 800), “who was dearly loved by his neighbours . . . for his skill in reciting their...

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• Neoliberal Riskscapes and Preemptive Poetics in Orly Castel-Bloom’s<i>Dolly City</i>

  Comparative Literature · 2019-02-06

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  Abstract Focusing on Hebrew writer Orly Castel-Bloom’s novel Dolly City (1993), as well as on her short stories published in the same period, this essay analyzes how neoliberal principles of risk management, primarily risk privatization and speculation, shape postmodernist literary genres and techniques. It argues that Dolly City reflects, thematically and formally, a shift between two biopolitical models of governance: from a welfare model based on a calculable and statistical futurity and on communal sacrifice, to a neoliberal model grounded in a speculative futurity and a zero-risk principle of preemption. Dr. Dolly, the narrator of the novel, who suffers from the neoliberal “illness of improbable possibilities,” applies this preemptive principle to language itself, creating what this essay defines as “preemptive poetics:” a literalized and material approach to language that protects it from the infinite improbable possibilities of figurative expression. Dolly City traces the postmodernist problem of the destabilized text, detached from any knowable intention, to neoliberal political-economic principles of risk management.

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• Gendering the Arab-Jew: Feminism and Jewish Studies after Ella Shohat

  Jewish Social Studies · 2019-01-01

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  Gendering the Arab-Jew:Feminism and Jewish Studies after Ella Shohat Shir Alon (bio) Setting out to write an essay about cultural theorist Ella Shohat's influence on Jewish Studies over the past 30 years, I couldn't help but wonder (perhaps a bit maliciously) what Shohat, who debuted in academia with an unprecedented study of Israeli cinema from a postcolonial feminist perspective,1 would say about the recent, so-called Jewish Studies film Footnote (2011). Given that it centers on quarrels between Jewish philologists, Footnote was a surprising success both in Israel and at international festivals, even nominated for an Academy Award.2 No doubt its depiction of the relationship between two generations of Talmud scholars, father and son, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem struck a (local and international) chord. Armed with a theatrical soundtrack and humorous voice-over, the film narrates contemporary Jewish Studies as an Oedipal struggle between Ashkenazi men over official recognition, embodied in the Israel Prize. Women are assigned supportive roles as wives and mothers (alas, they occasionally dare not to be supportive enough!). One scene in particular seems to give a knowing wink to the viewing Jewish scholar, as the soundtrack gives way to a squabble, overheard at a cocktail party, about Daniel Boyarin's feminized Jewish man.3 Nevertheless, the pleasure is somewhat bitter if that scholar happens to be a woman, since Boyarin is employed merely to enforce the story of Jewish modernity as a story of masculinity. Whether it is a masculinity gained or lost depends on what flavor of masculinity you favor, but what is certain is that women remain irrelevant to it.4 [End Page 57] It is only fitting that the plot of the film rises and falls on a dramatic philological inquiry into the word metsudah, "fortress," since it presents Jewish Studies as a bastion of white men surrounded by resolute gatekeepers. Women, Mizrahi Jews, or Jerusalem's Palestinians are absent from the university citadel on the hill. What we do see, again and again, are the expressionless security guards standing at every door, profiling those attempting to enter. These guards, ubiquitous in Israeli public spaces since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, are the one visual reference in the film to Israel's ongoing regime of separation. To anyone working in the field of Jewish Studies, the film's image of the discipline is clearly anachronistic: the walls of the fortress have been breached (though not toppled). Work done over the past 40 years has introduced both new research approaches and new objects of study, in dynamic exchange with critical gender, race, and ethnic studies, as well as vital criticism of Jewish Studies' commitment to a Zionist telos. Ella Shohat's writing, taking place at the intersection of Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and critical race scholarship, directly and indirectly inspired many of these changes. The recent publication of an anthology of her collected writing spanning the past 30 years provides an occasion to assess her influence on the field.5 It seems instructive to position Shohat's intervention alongside Boyarin's, since both have utilized postcolonial and feminist theoretical tools to present foundational and resonant challenges to Jewish Studies: both engage with Jewish identity against its immediate context—Christianity in Boyarin's case and Arab/Muslim culture in the case of Shohat; both associate Zionism, albeit in different ways, with a kind of colonial mimicry, an effort to whiten and westernize the Jew, with destructive psychological effects; and both identify gendered mechanisms of orientalization, demonstrating that the effeminate Jew and the effeminate oriental share the burden of the European gaze. Yet, there is also an important difference between the two: whereas Boyarin is invested in identifying Jewish difference (and therefore an ethical-political Jewish essence),6 Shohat strives to multiply Jewish histories and challenge the paradigms that partition Jews from Arabs, East from West, and modernity from tradition, and in this manner she threatens to dismantle the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish Studies and its coherent object of research.7 This is one possible reason why Shohat and Boyarin's interventions rarely interact in American scholarship. Critical seminars...

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• Elias KhouryChildren of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam

  World Literature Today · 2019-01-01

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  an endless stream of garbage. The adults, aloof, smoke cigarettes, throw soirees, drink espresso, and traipse the rocky terrain in impractical yet glamorous shoes. Johanna Stoberock’s Pigs comes in the wake of an increase in climate fiction, or cli-fi, where the Anthropocene and humanity ’s relationship to a changing climate are dramatized. While the climate is not necessarily dramatized, the environment in Pigs can certainly be menacing. The ocean, as the children experience, changes its mood. It will suddenly burn, leaving welts and scars. One has to suspect the ocean’s hostile demeanor is a possible response to chemical waste and garbage infecting the water, but it might also be a reflection of the children’s relationship to their environment, a work of imagination and psychology. Or fantasy. Stoberock isn’t clear. The children are harmed. The irresponsible adults, rendered grotesque by Stoberock, do nothing. Yet it is the world’s garbage, rather than the natural environment, that relentlessly encroaches. Pigs strays from a strict cli-fi categorization. Instead, the book takes on a mystical quality with elements of fable, allegory, and fantasy. Comparisons to the work of postmodern fabulist Italo Calvino are well placed. While the narrative is clear in its critique of systemic modern excess and the burden placed on future generations, Pigs is rarely didactic and never condescending. Stoberock ’s straightforward prose is filled with energy that advances the linear plot. With its sincere, omniscient narrator, the reader is privy to the children’s distinct thought processes , their search for memories from before their life of feeding trash to pigs, and their dreams of escape from the island and, worse, its cruel and careless adults. Pigs is effective and engaging; the reader wants, more than anything, the children to find freedom and escape. While Stoberock explores themes of nostalgia, innocence, and of returning home, we come to understand the potential impossibility of that return. The possibility of nowhere to turn. Although the majority of Pigs is told linearly, the children’s tale is interjected with short, fragmentary chapters where the narrator considers how the island looks from a distance from various points of view. “Always,” the narrator muses, “from a distance, the island was far away. Always, it was just out Books in Review ELIAS KHOURY Elias Khoury Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam Trans. Humphrey Davies. Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2019. 428 pages. Adam Dannoun, a melancholic Palestinian self-exiled in New York and the protagonist-narrator of Children of the Ghetto, suffers from literary issues. “I’m not based on any model,” Dannoun insists in his notebook. “My story sums up nothing but itself, and I don’t want to be a symbol.” Nevertheless, the story of his life as he recounts it is a patchwork of allusions to canonical works by Palestinian and Israeli writers, and his death restages that of exiled Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein, who fell asleep with a burning cigarette in his New York apartment in 1977. While Dannoun is a literary-insider joke, he is also a complex narrator trying to confront his past. This is not the first time Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury tackles the “Palestinian story” as a narrative problem. His epic Gate of the Sun (also translated by Humphrey Davies) collected countless stories of the Palestinian Nakba —the defeat and expulsion of Palestine’s inhabitants with the establishment of Israel in 1948—demonstrating the collective force of storytelling and oral history. In My Name Is Adam, the first title from the trilogy Children of the Ghetto, Khoury explores a similar constellation linking historical trauma, silenced memory, and narrative form—yet this novel’s stance on the possibilities and ethics of narrative is much darker. The notebooks that make up this novel, Khoury tells us, were saved from the fire that killed Adam Dannoun: these are his notes for two novels, never completed, which Khoury presents in unedited form. The first, which suggests that Dannoun would not have made a great writer, is an attempt to write the forgotten story of a minor Abbasid108 WLT AUTUMN 2019 of focus.” Using repetitious phrasing, these fragmented chapters build in intensity. Moreover , they reveal how Stoberock plays with...

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• No One to See Here: Genres of Neutralization and the Ongoing Nakba

  2019-01-01 · 12 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• Gil Z. Hochberg

  1 shared

Labs

• Shir Alon LabPI

Awards & honors

• McKnight Land-Grant Professor, 2024-2026