Il est courant aujourd'hui d'opposer les Arabes aux Juifs et les musulmans aux juifs. Depuis des ... moreIl est courant aujourd'hui d'opposer les Arabes aux Juifs et les musulmans aux juifs. Depuis des décennies, Ella Shohat déplace les paradigmes, et notamment cette opposition trop souvent commodément naturalisée et instrumentalisée, qui nie les stratifications de l'histoire. Shohat déplie tout ce qui relie les « deux 1492 » (la Reconquista et la « découverte » des Amériques), les petites et grandes ruptures coloniales et la mise en récit des passés juifs dans les espaces musulmans après la partition de 1948 en Israël/Palestine. Elle élabore une pensée des figures juives arabes, notamment à partir du fait constitué par les descendants juifs des sujets colonisés dans les espaces arabo-musulmans. Penser les juifs arabes, c'est dire la perte de mondes, mais aussi la traversée des frontières. Shohat montre ce qui rapproche des géographies humaines et des champs de recherche habituellement maintenus séparés. Contextualisés par une introduction et une préface, les quatre textes de ce recueil illustrent le rôle fondateur de Shohat dans le champ des études juives arabes/mizrahies. L'autrice y redéfinit l'exil, la diaspora et le retour dans une perspective qui révèle des paysages complexes d'appartenance. Née dans une famille juive de Bagdad, Ella Shohat a grandi en Israël et vit aujourd'hui à New York. Elle est professeure en études culturelles à la New York University. Personnalité majeure du champ postcolonial, elle est traduite dans de nombreuses langues.
Honorable Mention in the Non-Fiction category for the 2014 Arab American Book Award, The Arab Ame... moreHonorable Mention in the Non-Fiction category for the 2014 Arab American Book Award, The Arab American Museum.
Love, Hate, and the Nation-State F lagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism ... moreLove, Hate, and the Nation-State F lagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism is written at a moment of double crisis for Americans, one external-anti-Americanism-and the other internal-American self-doubt and division. This book explores the connections between the two crises and the relation of both crises to patriotism. In terms of anti-Americanism, this external crisis has now reached a fever pitch around the world, leading to the ubiquitous question, "Why do they hate us?" Usually, the question implies, "Why do the Muslims/Arabs hate us?" But resentment against the United States, due to the Iraq War, has become virtually universal; it is hardly limited to Arabs/Muslims. Polls show that majorities in most countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America oppose American foreign policy and the U.S. role as selfappointed global "leader." Even many Canadians now nd the United States frightening. This opposition at times takes hyperbolic forms, even in "allied" spaces like Spain. According to one Spanish writer, Moncho Tamames, anti-Americanism is now the principal ideological current in the world. It knows no frontiers and is more massive than any social movement in history. … Although Americans, who measure everything through the prism of material wealth, like to think it is motivated by envy, in fact it is motivated by the atrocities that have accompanied all aspects of the emergence of the country and by the cultural colonialism that they impose on us. xii Preface Whether or not one agrees with such judgments, it is important for Americans to know that such things are being said and to weigh the truth or falsity of the claims. The easy, self-attering answer to the "hate us" question, of course, is that they hate us because they envy our freedom. (Which leaves unexplained why they don't hate other equally free countries such as Canada, Sweden, or Costa Rica.) Indeed, one jocular response to the question was that "they hate us because we are so ignorant that we don't even know why they hate us." In terms of the internal crisis, meanwhile, American self-condence is quite literally " agging." Polls show an inchoate sense of disillusionment, with large majorities feeling that "the country is moving in the wrong direction." Americans are less and less convinced that the United States is truly fair or democratic. According to a poll, only percent believed that the U.S. government served the "interests of all." Two-thirds of respondents in a Gallup poll believed that "no matter what new laws are passed, special interests will always nd a way to maintain their power in Washington." Events such as / , Enron, the Iraq War, and the response to Hurricane Katrina have undermined American self-con dence, leading some Americans to wonder what there is left to love about America. The events of / posed the question "Why do Islamic fundamentalists hate us?" Then the Iraq War posed the question of whether "preventive war" was legitimate and wise, or a gigantic moral lapse and strategic blunder. Hurricane Katrina, nally, triggered a crisis in self-con dence, as it became clearer and clearer that despite all the bluster about "national security," the government could not, or perhaps would not, protect us in a crisis. The same government that could airlift food to the hungry in Afghanistan, that could mobilize helicopters to rescue downed pilots in Iraq, could not marshal its forces to save the dying in New Orleans. All the rhetoric about "terror," it turned out, was meant to terrorize us. Iraq was not a threat; we invaded Iraq, it became apparent, not because it was strong but because it was weak. In terms of terrorism, meanwhile, almost nothing had been done to make us safe, and in many ways things had gotten worse. While George W. Bush made it a top priority to talk about security, he did precious little to actually make us more secure. Katrina posed in the starkest terms the question of the basic contract between a government and its people-the contract Preface xiii
It was sometime around the end of the last century that Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press app... moreIt was sometime around the end of the last century that Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press approached me about doing a collection of my essays. Apart from the usual dilemmas about exactly which essays to "house" in this textual exhibition, it initially seemed a rather easy task to collate some pieces, known and not so known, from the 1980s and 1990s. While flipping through the wrinkled pages, however, I had a queasy feeling that ?isplaying only "oldies" would constitute a kind of textual tomb, evoking for me the geniza-the Judaic storage or burial of paper bearing the scriptural traces of the name of the Divine. The whole process virtually begged for an ironic reflection on the academic correlatives of temples and disciples and sacred texts, and on the institutions that enshrine those texts. As a not-so-dead author, I sought to spare the reader, as far as possible, from participating in a quasi-necrophilic pilgrimage. The inclusion of more recent work, I believed, would facilitate a more vital back and forth shuttling between past and present. Rather than speak to a frozen textual moment, then, Taboo Memories,
Preambule-7 Depasser les anciennes dichotomies-35 Le discours dominant siorllste-41 L'histoire co... morePreambule-7 Depasser les anciennes dichotomies-35 Le discours dominant siorllste-41 L'histoire confisquee-53 Le leurre de Sion-59 Le «rravail hebreu»: mythe et realite-67 La dialectique de la dependance-77 La far;ade de l'egalitansme-87 Les tests de civilisation-95 La diabolisation des misrahim-101 Les signes de la revolte misrahi-109 Epilogue-117 Notes-l22
The long voyage to produce Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, from i... moreThe long voyage to produce Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, from its inception as a symposium to this book, has finally come to an end. The volume was conceived out of a desire to celebrate the accomplishments of activists, artists, curators, and scholars working on what I call here "multicultural feminism." Many of us had long lamented the lack of space for interacting, conversing, and dialoguing within the public sphere, and for me the symposium and the book formed welcome opportunities for forging such a space. Especially exciting for me was the idea of shaping synergies between diverse locations: academic fora, cultural institutions, political organizations, and community centers.
Aamir Mufti I Ella Shohat Was there ever such a place? Home and the loss of home constitute a rec... moreAamir Mufti I Ella Shohat Was there ever such a place? Home and the loss of home constitute a recurring motif of modernity. The post-world war era has seen it return, nourished on fresh historical experiences, imbued with new meanings. In the last decade, specifically, rearticulated notions of exile and diaspora have played an important role in a cultural critique that not only charted the history of communities displaced in the postindependence era but also employed that history as a condition and a trope for cultural criticism itself. 4 In the repeated mutual impacting of divergent trajectories, claims, and memories that constitute the cultural landscape of late capitalism, the loss of home and the struggle to reclaim and reimagine it are experiences fraught with tension. But whereas in the era of Third Worldist euphoria the limitation and repressions of the nation were often hushed, today they have been brought center stage within critical and cultural practices. Nation, community, race, class, religion, gender, sexuality-each names a site for the enactment of the great drama of origins, loyalty, belonging, betrayal; in short, of identity and identification. The gradual eclipse of the revolutionary anticolonial era has been accompanied by the emergence of new forms of selfhood, political allegiance, capital accumulation, imperial power, and mass migration, forms whose contours are perhaps still only half-visible. Postcolonial criticism is now a familiar mode of cultural practice in the Anglo-American academy. The perspectives on imperialism produced within this new intellectual formation represent a perceptible shift relative to the critical positions that had developed out of and alongside anticolonial revolutionary movements for national liberation in the postwar era both in the Third and First Worlds. The anticolonial struggles have had their repercussions in the academy, seen in the efforts to decolonize Eurocentric culture. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives brings together a set of essays on currently debated Third World and postcolonial issues within cultural studies. Located within a transitional moment in the history of "center-periphery" relations, they seek to address, from a wide range of perspectives and positions, the structure of inequalities inherent in the present moment. They also examine the dilemmas and contradictions of the ongoing critique of racism and imperialism at a moment when such politically mobiliZing categories as "Third World" and even "nation" have lost their earlier liberationist clarity and thrust. But, above all, they represent an attempt at grappling with the meaning of location and belonging, of communities of interpretation and praxis, of home, in the increasingly diasporic panoramas of the contemporary world. Some of the recently published collections on cultural studies do not give sufficiently complex attention to these debates. Furthermore, while multicultural volumes tend to focus on the U.S. context and postcolonial anthologies tend to ignore it, Dangerous Liaisons insists upon precisely the contrapuntal juxtaposition of these diverse yet related debates. Our editorial process was guided by a conceptual framework that refuses to separate the linked histories of race as well as the contemporary coimplication of communities within and across the borders of nation-states. In a world where Third World immigrants to the United States can participate in racist discourses and practices toward U.S. Native American and African-American communities, where U.S. racial "minorities" might join U.S. imperial wars, and where Third World national elites become complicit with the new world order being created by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, it is impossible to discuss
Il est courant aujourd'hui d'opposer les Arabes aux Juifs et les musulmans aux juifs. Depuis des ... moreIl est courant aujourd'hui d'opposer les Arabes aux Juifs et les musulmans aux juifs. Depuis des décennies, Ella Shohat déplace les paradigmes, et notamment cette opposition trop souvent commodément naturalisée et instrumentalisée, qui nie les stratifications de l'histoire. Shohat déplie tout ce qui relie les « deux 1492 » (la Reconquista et la « découverte » des Amériques), les petites et grandes ruptures coloniales et la mise en récit des passés juifs dans les espaces musulmans après la partition de 1948 en Israël/Palestine. Elle élabore une pensée des figures juives arabes, notamment à partir du fait constitué par les descendants juifs des sujets colonisés dans les espaces arabo-musulmans. Penser les juifs arabes, c'est dire la perte de mondes, mais aussi la traversée des frontières. Shohat montre ce qui rapproche des géographies humaines et des champs de recherche habituellement maintenus séparés. Contextualisés par une introduction et une préface, les quatre textes de ce recueil illustrent le rôle fondateur de Shohat dans le champ des études juives arabes/mizrahies. L'autrice y redéfinit l'exil, la diaspora et le retour dans une perspective qui révèle des paysages complexes d'appartenance. Née dans une famille juive de Bagdad, Ella Shohat a grandi en Israël et vit aujourd'hui à New York. Elle est professeure en études culturelles à la New York University. Personnalité majeure du champ postcolonial, elle est traduite dans de nombreuses langues.
Honorable Mention in the Non-Fiction category for the 2014 Arab American Book Award, The Arab Ame... moreHonorable Mention in the Non-Fiction category for the 2014 Arab American Book Award, The Arab American Museum.
Love, Hate, and the Nation-State F lagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism ... moreLove, Hate, and the Nation-State F lagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism is written at a moment of double crisis for Americans, one external-anti-Americanism-and the other internal-American self-doubt and division. This book explores the connections between the two crises and the relation of both crises to patriotism. In terms of anti-Americanism, this external crisis has now reached a fever pitch around the world, leading to the ubiquitous question, "Why do they hate us?" Usually, the question implies, "Why do the Muslims/Arabs hate us?" But resentment against the United States, due to the Iraq War, has become virtually universal; it is hardly limited to Arabs/Muslims. Polls show that majorities in most countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America oppose American foreign policy and the U.S. role as selfappointed global "leader." Even many Canadians now nd the United States frightening. This opposition at times takes hyperbolic forms, even in "allied" spaces like Spain. According to one Spanish writer, Moncho Tamames, anti-Americanism is now the principal ideological current in the world. It knows no frontiers and is more massive than any social movement in history. … Although Americans, who measure everything through the prism of material wealth, like to think it is motivated by envy, in fact it is motivated by the atrocities that have accompanied all aspects of the emergence of the country and by the cultural colonialism that they impose on us. xii Preface Whether or not one agrees with such judgments, it is important for Americans to know that such things are being said and to weigh the truth or falsity of the claims. The easy, self-attering answer to the "hate us" question, of course, is that they hate us because they envy our freedom. (Which leaves unexplained why they don't hate other equally free countries such as Canada, Sweden, or Costa Rica.) Indeed, one jocular response to the question was that "they hate us because we are so ignorant that we don't even know why they hate us." In terms of the internal crisis, meanwhile, American self-condence is quite literally " agging." Polls show an inchoate sense of disillusionment, with large majorities feeling that "the country is moving in the wrong direction." Americans are less and less convinced that the United States is truly fair or democratic. According to a poll, only percent believed that the U.S. government served the "interests of all." Two-thirds of respondents in a Gallup poll believed that "no matter what new laws are passed, special interests will always nd a way to maintain their power in Washington." Events such as / , Enron, the Iraq War, and the response to Hurricane Katrina have undermined American self-con dence, leading some Americans to wonder what there is left to love about America. The events of / posed the question "Why do Islamic fundamentalists hate us?" Then the Iraq War posed the question of whether "preventive war" was legitimate and wise, or a gigantic moral lapse and strategic blunder. Hurricane Katrina, nally, triggered a crisis in self-con dence, as it became clearer and clearer that despite all the bluster about "national security," the government could not, or perhaps would not, protect us in a crisis. The same government that could airlift food to the hungry in Afghanistan, that could mobilize helicopters to rescue downed pilots in Iraq, could not marshal its forces to save the dying in New Orleans. All the rhetoric about "terror," it turned out, was meant to terrorize us. Iraq was not a threat; we invaded Iraq, it became apparent, not because it was strong but because it was weak. In terms of terrorism, meanwhile, almost nothing had been done to make us safe, and in many ways things had gotten worse. While George W. Bush made it a top priority to talk about security, he did precious little to actually make us more secure. Katrina posed in the starkest terms the question of the basic contract between a government and its people-the contract Preface xiii
It was sometime around the end of the last century that Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press app... moreIt was sometime around the end of the last century that Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press approached me about doing a collection of my essays. Apart from the usual dilemmas about exactly which essays to "house" in this textual exhibition, it initially seemed a rather easy task to collate some pieces, known and not so known, from the 1980s and 1990s. While flipping through the wrinkled pages, however, I had a queasy feeling that ?isplaying only "oldies" would constitute a kind of textual tomb, evoking for me the geniza-the Judaic storage or burial of paper bearing the scriptural traces of the name of the Divine. The whole process virtually begged for an ironic reflection on the academic correlatives of temples and disciples and sacred texts, and on the institutions that enshrine those texts. As a not-so-dead author, I sought to spare the reader, as far as possible, from participating in a quasi-necrophilic pilgrimage. The inclusion of more recent work, I believed, would facilitate a more vital back and forth shuttling between past and present. Rather than speak to a frozen textual moment, then, Taboo Memories,
Preambule-7 Depasser les anciennes dichotomies-35 Le discours dominant siorllste-41 L'histoire co... morePreambule-7 Depasser les anciennes dichotomies-35 Le discours dominant siorllste-41 L'histoire confisquee-53 Le leurre de Sion-59 Le «rravail hebreu»: mythe et realite-67 La dialectique de la dependance-77 La far;ade de l'egalitansme-87 Les tests de civilisation-95 La diabolisation des misrahim-101 Les signes de la revolte misrahi-109 Epilogue-117 Notes-l22
The long voyage to produce Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, from i... moreThe long voyage to produce Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, from its inception as a symposium to this book, has finally come to an end. The volume was conceived out of a desire to celebrate the accomplishments of activists, artists, curators, and scholars working on what I call here "multicultural feminism." Many of us had long lamented the lack of space for interacting, conversing, and dialoguing within the public sphere, and for me the symposium and the book formed welcome opportunities for forging such a space. Especially exciting for me was the idea of shaping synergies between diverse locations: academic fora, cultural institutions, political organizations, and community centers.
Aamir Mufti I Ella Shohat Was there ever such a place? Home and the loss of home constitute a rec... moreAamir Mufti I Ella Shohat Was there ever such a place? Home and the loss of home constitute a recurring motif of modernity. The post-world war era has seen it return, nourished on fresh historical experiences, imbued with new meanings. In the last decade, specifically, rearticulated notions of exile and diaspora have played an important role in a cultural critique that not only charted the history of communities displaced in the postindependence era but also employed that history as a condition and a trope for cultural criticism itself. 4 In the repeated mutual impacting of divergent trajectories, claims, and memories that constitute the cultural landscape of late capitalism, the loss of home and the struggle to reclaim and reimagine it are experiences fraught with tension. But whereas in the era of Third Worldist euphoria the limitation and repressions of the nation were often hushed, today they have been brought center stage within critical and cultural practices. Nation, community, race, class, religion, gender, sexuality-each names a site for the enactment of the great drama of origins, loyalty, belonging, betrayal; in short, of identity and identification. The gradual eclipse of the revolutionary anticolonial era has been accompanied by the emergence of new forms of selfhood, political allegiance, capital accumulation, imperial power, and mass migration, forms whose contours are perhaps still only half-visible. Postcolonial criticism is now a familiar mode of cultural practice in the Anglo-American academy. The perspectives on imperialism produced within this new intellectual formation represent a perceptible shift relative to the critical positions that had developed out of and alongside anticolonial revolutionary movements for national liberation in the postwar era both in the Third and First Worlds. The anticolonial struggles have had their repercussions in the academy, seen in the efforts to decolonize Eurocentric culture. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives brings together a set of essays on currently debated Third World and postcolonial issues within cultural studies. Located within a transitional moment in the history of "center-periphery" relations, they seek to address, from a wide range of perspectives and positions, the structure of inequalities inherent in the present moment. They also examine the dilemmas and contradictions of the ongoing critique of racism and imperialism at a moment when such politically mobiliZing categories as "Third World" and even "nation" have lost their earlier liberationist clarity and thrust. But, above all, they represent an attempt at grappling with the meaning of location and belonging, of communities of interpretation and praxis, of home, in the increasingly diasporic panoramas of the contemporary world. Some of the recently published collections on cultural studies do not give sufficiently complex attention to these debates. Furthermore, while multicultural volumes tend to focus on the U.S. context and postcolonial anthologies tend to ignore it, Dangerous Liaisons insists upon precisely the contrapuntal juxtaposition of these diverse yet related debates. Our editorial process was guided by a conceptual framework that refuses to separate the linked histories of race as well as the contemporary coimplication of communities within and across the borders of nation-states. In a world where Third World immigrants to the United States can participate in racist discourses and practices toward U.S. Native American and African-American communities, where U.S. racial "minorities" might join U.S. imperial wars, and where Third World national elites become complicit with the new world order being created by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, it is impossible to discuss
, where she teaches courses on ethnic studies, Asian American literature and film, postcolonial s... more, where she teaches courses on ethnic studies, Asian American literature and film, postcolonial studies, race, and popular culture. She is preparing a manuscript on American imperialism as a visual language and the representation of the Filipino and Filipina savage. Patrick Deer teaches in the Department of English at New York University, where he focuses on war culture, modernism, the twentieth-century novel and film, and postcolonial and cultural studies. He recently completed the manuscript of "Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature." His published work includes "The Dogs of War: Myths of British Anti-Americanism," in Anti-Americanism, ed. Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross (New York University Press), and "Defusing the English Patient," an essay on the film adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel commissioned for A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. Robert Stam (Blackwell).
She is coauthor, with Martin Tanaka, of Lecciones del final del fujimorismo (Lessons on the End o... moreShe is coauthor, with Martin Tanaka, of Lecciones del final del fujimorismo (Lessons on the End of Fujimori) (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos).
In the three years since the outbreak of the second Intifada in October 2000, the policy making o... moreIn the three years since the outbreak of the second Intifada in October 2000, the policy making of the U.S. government has been haunted by the question of Palestine. The Intifada made briefly visible the consequences of Israel's continued occupation and expanded colonization of the West Bank and Gaza, an expansion facilitated by the Oslo accords of 1993 and disguised under the name of "the peace process." Within a year, however, the launching of the worldwide war on terror provided Washington with a new way to misrepresent the nature of Israel's war against the Palestinians. A century-long history of dispossession, expulsion, occupation, and resistance was reduced, once again, to a series of Palestinian acts of terror. A people's loss of their homes and homeland, of their freedom of movement and human dignity, of their personal security and political future, could instead be framed as a battle of civilization against terror, of democracy against hatred, of the West against Islam. Under the banner of the war on terror, the United States then announced its plans for a war against Iraq as the cornerstone of an unapologetic project to remake the political order of the Middle East. Yet the question of Palestine refused to disappear. From the protests of up to half a million people in several cities of Europe to the revived antiwar activism of the campuses of North American universities (see Vincent Lloyd and Zia Mian's essay in this issue), an emergent peace movement in the West placed the issue of Palestinian rights, alongside the right of the Iraqi people to be spared the devastation of war, at the center of its politics. The importance attached to the Palestine question was a response to the obvious discrepancy between Washington's use of U.N. Security Council resolutions against Iraq, its disregard for council resolutions against Israel, and its vetoing of any international intervention on behalf of the Palestinians. But the importance reflected something larger. The injustice against the Palestinians has always been carried out in the name of the West. Washington supports, funds, and arms many forms of injustice in the Middle East. But only in the case of Israel is the injustice disguised and defended as a moral struggle of the West against the rest. The Palestine question now haunts the West, much as the question of apartheid haunted a previous generation. We draw the analogy with apartheid not to make any simplistic historical comparison between Israel and South
Lopamudra Basu grew up in Calcutta and attended the University of Delhi in India. She is a doctor... moreLopamudra Basu grew up in Calcutta and attended the University of Delhi in India. She is a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is working on a dissertation on "The Postcolonial Migrant Intellectual," examining South Asian and African novels as reflections of, and engagements in, critical debates in postcolonial societies.
This essay questions the axiomatic ontology of the“Judeo-Arabic language” as a cohesive unit sep... moreThis essay questions the axiomatic ontology of the “Judeo-Arabic language” as a cohesive unit separate from Arabic and its entanglement in the persistent ambivalence surrounding the conjoining of “the Jewish” and “the Arab.” In the wake of the partition of Palestine and the dislocation of Arab-Jews to Israel, classificatory categories, which can be traced to the nineteenth-century academic meeting ground of Semitic/Oriental and Hebraic/Judaic studies, came to be reinforced in the twentieth century within Zionist discourse. Largely shaped by foundational scholars of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, knowledge production about Arabic-speaking Jews was embedded in what the essay regards as “Judeo-Arabic Orientalism.” Entrenched in the politics of linguistic naming is a partitioning ethnonationalist imaginary of culture and belonging. The epistemic framework undergirding “Judeo-Arabic language” is emblematic of what the essay refers to as “the separationist thesis.” Revisiting a few key arguments, the essay traces the genealogy not of a language but rather of an idea of a language, highlighting the invention of a paradoxical formation—an Arabic that is at once non-Arabic. KEYWORDS: Judeo-Arabic language; the separationist thesis; Judeo- Arabic Orientalism; hyphen in Arab-Jew; hyphen in Judeo-Arabic; disavowal of Arabic; partitioning imaginary; indigenous naming; de-Arabization
ecent years have seen a renaissance of Mizrahi and/or Arab-Jewish cultural practices related to i... moreecent years have seen a renaissance of Mizrahi and/or Arab-Jewish cultural practices related to identity and belonging. These practices too must be seen against the backdrop of contested histories and terminologies. The identity crisis provoked by the rupture of Jews from their largely Arab/Muslim countries is re ected in a terminological crisis in which no single term seems to fully represent a coherent entity. The very proliferation of terms suggests the enormous dif culties of grappling with the complexities of this identity. To name a few: "
The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East, 2019
In this essay, Ella Shohat argues that the question of the Arab-Jew, in contrast to present-day e... moreIn this essay, Ella Shohat argues that the question of the Arab-Jew, in contrast to present-day ethno-nationalist 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 ethno-nationalist 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. “On Orientalist Genealogies” traces such representational ruptures back to the 19th 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 onto 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 anti-Semitism, 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 Judeo-Muslim cultural geography. Here the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew reveals an intricate landscape of belonging that offers an alternative conceptual framework 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.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2017
This essay examines the issue of linguistic belonging as invented within national and colonial it... moreThis essay examines the issue of linguistic belonging as invented within national and colonial itineraries. More specifically, it explores the genealogy of the notion of 'Judeo-Arabic language' and its axiomatic definition as a cohesive unity separate from Arabic. Underscoring instead the terms deployed by Arabic-speaking Jews themselves, the essay asks whether the concept of 'Judeo-Arabic,' proposed by contemporary linguists, corresponds to the naming within the language itself or rather to a paradigm influenced by post-Haskala (Enlightenment) Judaic studies and Jewish nationalism. While recognizing the specificities of the Arabic(s) deployed by Jews, the essay interrogates the view of 'Judeo-Arabic' as classifiable under the historically novel rubric of isolatable 'Jewish languages' severed from their neighboring dialect/languages, in this case Arabic. It also casts doubt on an 'endangered language' discourse premised on the Arabic/Judeo-Arabic split, by asking whether the idea of a salvage project for a 'dying language' does not reproduce the same conceptual binaries that produced the disappearance of 'the language' in the first place. Despite the demographic dislocation from Arab spaces in the wake of Palestine's partition, the essay suggests, the Arabic(s) spoken by Jews have always beeb and have remained intimately linked, even now across the Israeli/Arab divide, forming part of a living assemblage of Arabic variations. Examining Arabic vernaculars as performed along a discursive spectrum from erudite to popular culture, the essay highlights Arabic/Hebrew syncretism, tracing the presence of Arabic, for example, in music and literature. Within a transnational approach, the essay stresses the phantasmic dimension that led to 'Judeo-Arabic,' in the wake of its displacement from Arabic-speaking cultural geographies, being simultaneously rejected and desired.
Studies in American Jewish Literature: A Journal of Literary Criticism & Theory, 2016
Tracing Orientalism back to the two 1492s—of Iberia and of the Americas—the authors examine Lati... moreTracing Orientalism back to the two 1492s—of Iberia and of the Americas— the authors examine Latin America’s ambivalence toward its Moorish-Sephardic heritage. Once belonging to a shared cultural landscape, Muslims and Jews were later seen by Ibero-American authorities as alien excrescences to be symbolically excised from a putatively pure body politic. Modernization came to be synonymous with Occidentalization. Using Gilberto Freyre’s work as a case study, the authors highlight his tracing of both patriarchal authoritarianism and sexual-racial flexibility in relation to Brazil’s Moorish lineage, as well as his recuperation of the Sephardi for the national formation of Brazil’s economy, science, and culture. Freyre’s revisionist project with regards to the Sephardi and the Moor, which offers a Luso-Brazilian apologia of miscegenation, must be understood in light of the omission of the enslaved African-Muslims from official history. The authors outline the “anxious affections” that the Janus-faced figure of the Moor/Sephardi has provoked in the Americas, thus disturbing facile analytical dichotomies of East/West and North/South.
She has lectured and written extensively on issues having to do with Eurocentrism, exoticism, ori... moreShe has lectured and written extensively on issues having to do with Eurocentrism, exoticism, orientalism, as well as postcolonialism, transnationalism, and diasporic cultures. Her books include Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age; the co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism winner of the (Katherine Kovacs Singer Best Book Award);
Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought, 2015
In her moving and path-breaking book Red Pedagogy, Sandy Grande opens up a generous dialogue with... moreIn her moving and path-breaking book Red Pedagogy, Sandy Grande opens up a generous dialogue with leftist advocates of "critical pedagogy," giving the movement considerable credit while also finding it wanting from an Indigenous perspective. The left speaks of "democracy," Grande points out, but for Indigenous peoples "democracy" has often been a "weapon of mass destruction." The Marxist left speaks of "revolution," but some Latin American revolutions have dispossessed Miskitus, Sumus, Ramas, and Quechua. Critical pedagogy, from a Red pedagogical perspective, opposes the colonialist project yet remains informed by individualism, anthropocentrism, and stagist progressivism, epistemic biases that worsen the ecological crisis.
Shohat and Stam put forward the idea of a Tropical Orientalism in Brazil. They interpret the cont... moreShohat and Stam put forward the idea of a Tropical Orientalism in Brazil. They interpret the contemporary Brazilian imaginary of the orient against the backdrop of a Moorish-Sephardi unconscious, thus highlighting not only the positive cross-Atlantic historical, discursive, and cultural links between "the Orient" and "the Occident," but also the anxieties that such links provoked.
Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, 2000
Abstract by Lisa Suhair Majaj & Amal Amireh from the introduction to Going Global"The final ess... moreAbstract by Lisa Suhair Majaj & Amal Amireh from the introduction to Going Global
"The final essay, by Ella Shohat, "travels" not only between different continents but also between different genres of writing. The essay explores the role played by reception contexts in several disparate geographies in legitimizing certain categories of identification and delegitimizing others. Shohat examines how the United States constructs dislocated subjects who have already been displaced in other Eurocentric contexts (as seen, for instance, in her own experience of growing up as an Iraqi in Israel), and whose United States experience then confronts them with "the border patrols of new world naming." By placing her own journey (Iraq, Israel, United States) vis-a-vis that of the artist Lynne Yamamoto (Japan, Hawaii, United States), Shohat creates a kind of a dialogue between geographies and histories that are usually kept separate. This strategy illustrates the theoretical arguments she has put forward elsewhere, as in her co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism, which argues for discussing cultures "in-relation" rather than as "neatly fenced-off areas of expertise." Shohat particularly challenges the "predicament of the single hyphen" in the master narrative of immigration to the United States. In this master narrative, the hegemonic discourses of the reception context, fixed within the rigid boundaries of the nation-state and its often concomitant nationalist ideology, dictate which identities in multiply-hyphenated identities are granted credence, and which are made invisible or even censored. Shohat makes her argument largely through the case of Arab-Jews, a community that has already been displaced within the context of Asia and Africa (e.g., from Morocco to Israel) prior to its arrival in the United States. Reading Shohat's partially autobiographical essay against the backdrop of her scholarly work, which has challenged the academic reception of the term "postcolonialism" as well as critiqued the hegemonic narrative of "feminism," facilitates a reexamination of the relationship between the institutional reception of critical ideas and that of the critics voicing them. Her essay brings into focus the issues explored throughout the collection, making clear the impact of reception contexts in determining not only how texts are received but also how writers and others are constructed as subjects."
Breaking the Silence Good evening everyone! Masa' el-kher! Ismi Ella, bas ismi el-asli Habiba. [M... moreBreaking the Silence Good evening everyone! Masa' el-kher! Ismi Ella, bas ismi el-asli Habiba. [My name is Ella but my original name is Habiba]. Hiyya Mira, bas isma el-asli Rima. [Her name is Mira, but her original name is Rima.] Wa-hiyya Tikva, bas isma el-asli Amal. [She is Tikva, but her original name is Amal]. For those in the audience who do not speak Arabic, I began by introducing our names, followed by our original Arabic names of Habiba, Rima, and Amal. Our Hebrew names were registered on our identity cards by our parents. They did not register our Arabic names. In my case, I was named Habiba after my mother's grandmother, yet my mother did not put down this name on my identity card. After her bitter experience in Israel because of her Arab name Aziza-she knew that in a society where our names were associated with "the Arab enemy," anything related to the Middle East was considered a lifelong stigma. In a society where an Arab name triggered shame and failure, it was preferable to give a sabra-sounding Hebrew name. Thus, our identity crisis as Mizrahi women begins already with our very names. The core of the problem has to do with a country that sees itself as Western while denying its location in the Middle East, one with a majority population-Mizrahim and Palestinians-originating from the region. Although the matter of naming is only one small component of our oppression, it carries symbolic importance. Having been "stamped" with our sabra Hebrew names, we learned that it was illegitimate for us to maintain our culture, that we must erase our Middle Eastern identity in order to give birth to a sabra, i.e. Ashkenazi-Israeli identity. In fact, our mothers, whose names were changed by immigration clerks without so much as a second thought, An opening speech delivered at the plenary session of the th Annual Women's Conference, Givat Haviva, Israel, June-, (alongside speeches by Mira Eliezer and Tikva Levi-all under the same rubric: "Breaking the Silence: My Oppression as a Mizrahi Woman"), sections of which were published in Hebrew, "Le-Hafer et ha-Shtikot," HILA News, Issue (July,). The English translation included here, slightly edited, is taken from the publication of the speech, "Breaking the Silence," in a Special Section, "Mizrahi Oppression and Struggle," in News from Within (Alternative Information Center), Vol. , no. , August .
Movement Research: Performance Journal 1991-1992, 1991
Please note that this is the original version of this essay. It has been published in other forms... morePlease note that this is the original version of this essay. It has been published in other forms that include changes made without the author's approval, and the correct version is found here.
Elia Suleiman's New York-based film Homage by Assassination (1992) incorporates a few segments from Shohat's article, written during the 1990-91 Gulf War. Shohat & Suleiman rewrote the segments as a letter from Ella Habiba Shohat to her friend Elia Suleiman. As Suleiman receives the faxed letter, Shohat is heard in a voice-over reading from "Reflections of an Arab-Jew."
Ella Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings (London: Plut... moreElla Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings (London: Pluto Press, 2017). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Ella Shohat, "The Question of Judeo-Arabic," Opening Essay for Arab Studies Journal Vol. XXIII No... moreElla Shohat, "The Question of Judeo-Arabic," Opening Essay for Arab Studies Journal Vol. XXIII No. 1 (Fall 2015). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Ella Shohat (ES): This essay revolves around a very personal question for me-the name of the language I spoke with my grandparents and parents. Baghdadi-Jews like my family spoke the language, first in Iraq, then in Israel, and later in the US. For us, it was simply Arabic, although we also knew of course that it was a dialect, a specific form of an 'amiyya; in our case, Iraqi, Baghdadi, Jewish Arabic. Within the Jewish-Baghdadi dialect itself, we commonly referred to it as haki mal yihud (the speech of the Jews) in contrast to the neighboring dialect, haki mal aslam (the speech of the Muslims). Our dialect is a variation of the Muslawi dialect, jointly spoken, even if with some nuances, by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike in Mosul.
Politics of Representation," 1989), makes apparent the construction of the Occident and the Orien... morePolitics of Representation," 1989), makes apparent the construction of the Occident and the Orient in Zionist discourse, a critical project that she has also pursued in her book Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices(2006). In such books as Talking Visions , Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (with Robert Stam, 1994), and Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (with Robert Stam, 2012), she unsettles and reinterprets the boundaries between "the West and the Rest," as well as between the global South and global North. We spoke with Ella Shohat in a Berlin restaurant about the politicization of culture and the culturalization of politics. Here she tackles such varied subjects as the intimate connections between Jewish and Muslim histories and culture and the debates over circumcision, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism, always in a sensitive and empathetic manner, while still retaining analytical distance and a sharp theoretical vision. Sérgio Costa (SC): As you know, politics in the post-war world was dominated by the presence of nation-states and intellectual debates were very much shaped by a feeling of national belonging. Intellectuals were, in a certain way, pressured to declare their loyalty to a single national state. Your biography and your oeuvre are very much in-between-between national belongings, between ethnic belongings, and without a fixed national position. Could you please tell us about your trajectory and how this in-between positionality has influenced your work? ES: After World War Two, with decolonization and partitions, life shifted for many communities.
Israeli predicament as they bear upon Israeli films. With brilliant humanistic insight, Shohat de... moreIsraeli predicament as they bear upon Israeli films. With brilliant humanistic insight, Shohat describes the underlying ideological myths and allegorical structures and contributes significantly to a new, enlarged understanding of the dynamics between Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities, and between them and the Palestinians." I. B. Tauris has recently published a new edition of the book, with a substantial new postscript by Shohat.] Jadaliyya: What are the central themes and concepts of Israeli Cinema? How do you see the place of Palestine and Palestinian filmmakers in your book? Ella Shohat: Israeli Cinema is a deconstructionist reading of Zionist discourse, dealing centrally with Israeli representations of Palestine, of Palestinians, and of Arab-Jews. The book treats cinema as constitutive in the invention of the nation and looks at the myriad and proliferating Zionist representations of the land and the people in the first hundred years of cinematic production in Palestine. The book begins with a discussion of representations of the land; these include the Zionist production of emptiness in the professed endeavor to "make the desert bloom" and the civilizing mission evidenced in images of pioneer Sabras and exotic Arabs and endemic to the settler-colonial project. Subsequent chapters deal with post-1948 didactic allegories, siege narratives, Promethean narrative, and post-1967 spectacles of war in the heroic-nationalist genre. I spend a great deal of the book addressing and critiquing Zionist representations of Sephardim/Mizrahim/Arab-Jews, tracing issues of Orientalism, colonial rescue fantasies, and questions of dislocation and nostalgia. In the final chapter of the book, titled "The Return of the Repressed," I look at the then-recent Palestinian waves in Israeli cinema, in the mid-1980s. At that time, the first feature-length Palestinian film, Wedding in Galilee, was just being made. In terms of your second question: If the original book focused on Zionist representation of Palestine, the postscript to the new edition explicitly takes up the question of Palestinian cinema over the past two decades by focusing on the struggle on the part of Palestinians for selfrepresentation. Given the material realities of colonial-settler occupation and the diasporization of Palestine, it is important to look at Palestinian cinema within Israel, at the transnational
“Re-enactments and Transcripts” of a conversation published in Anywhere but Now: Landscapes of Be... more“Re-enactments and Transcripts” of a conversation published in Anywhere but Now: Landscapes of Belonging in the Eastern Mediterranean, coedited by Samar Kanafani, Munira Khayyat, Rasha Salti, and Layla Al-Zubaidi (Beirut: Heinrich Böll Foundation, Middle East Office, 2012). The conversation and the Q & A with the audience, which was transcribed by Hiba Haidar, took place after the screening of Samir’s Forget Baghdad: Arabs and Jews – the Iraqi Connection at the opening of a three-day public symposium, “Anywhere but Now,” organized by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and held at the Beirut Art Center. Conducted by independent curator and writer Rasha Salti and Layla Al-Zubaidi, director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Middle East Office, the conversation took place between Beirut and NY via Live Satellite Broadcast (April 2, 2009).
Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging, 2011
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... moreJSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contactsupport@jstor.org.
Ella Shohat is a rare example of an intellectual whose theoretical work has developed in close re... moreElla Shohat is a rare example of an intellectual whose theoretical work has developed in close relation to her personal history and maintained an intricate connection to it throughout a huge variety of transdisciplinary projects. Being raised in Israel by Baghdadi parents, and speaking Arabic at home, she later moved to the United States to pursue her studies, experiencing yet another dimension of being out of place, an out-ofplaceness that has been manifold. This existential factor of never quite belonging where you are set, both personally and with respect to a chosen discipline, informs her prolific work, which spans a large spectrum ranging from film/media studies, literary theory and visual culture to Middle Eastern, Jewish and postcolonial studies. From her early critique of Zionist discourse as articulated through the history of Israeli cinema and through her deconstructive analysis of Eurocentric thinkingcarried out with her frequent collaborator Robert Stam -to the reformulation of the project of 'critical polycentric multiculturalism' and 'diasporic perspectives', Shohat's intellectual orientation has always been one of dismantling existing power structures and hierarchies. Not only does her work reveal the extent to which today's transnationalism and multiculturalism necessitate new modes of thinking, but it also emphasizes the complexity and sometimes contradictory nature of diasporic voices, which are seldom articulated with such clarity and rigour.
"Des-orientar Cleopatra: um tropo moderno de Identidade," Cadernos Pagu 23, July-December 2004, pp. 11-54. (Portuguese translation of "Disorienting Cleopatra," 2003)
Cadernos Pagu, 2004
This article proposes a study about Cleopatra's representation throughout the last century, situa... moreThis article proposes a study about Cleopatra's representation throughout the last century, situating the debate on her looks and origins among colonial domination, anti-colonial struggles and post-colonial racial frictions that, as it tries to demonstrate, add another dimension towards understanding the investment in Cleopatra's identity.
In her essay, "On Imitation and the Art of Kdinapping", Ella Shohat attempts to articulate aspect... moreIn her essay, "On Imitation and the Art of Kdinapping", Ella Shohat attempts to articulate aspects of a resistant aesthetics, looking at Yigal Nizri's artwork, "Tiger," featured on the cover. The article links seemingly distant geographies around the question of mimesis. In Israel, "kitsch" artifacts, such as tiger blankets and works in needlepoint, are accompanied by a certain Mizrahi nostalgia that revives images of colonial exotica. Kitsch aesthetics tends toward mimicry due to the imbibing of mimetic values in the western arts, even when it is made in "bad taste" and reproduced mechanically for mass consumption. According to Shohat, the metanarrative that organizes art history as a linear march moving from realism through modernism to postmodernism is Eurocentric. Given the taboo on graven images, Judeo-Muslim culture, for example, preferred anti-mimetic aesthetics. The essay points to a dialectic between Mimesis and its negation, recycled, in some ways, into popular visual culture.
Ella Shohat is a Professor of Cultural Studies, Middle East studies and Comparative Literature at New York University.
"A Vinda para a America: reflexes sobre perda de cabelos e de memoria,” (Portuguese translation of "'Coming to America': Reflections on Hair and Memory Loss," 2000) Estudos Feministas, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Florianopolis, Brazil, 2002), pp. 99-117
Dans Revue d'études palestiniennes Revue d'études palestiniennes 1997/4 (N° 65) 1997/4 (N° 65), p... moreDans Revue d'études palestiniennes Revue d'études palestiniennes 1997/4 (N° 65) 1997/4 (N° 65), pages 51 à 63 Éditions Institut des études palestiniennes Institut des études palestiniennes Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Institut des études palestiniennes. Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Institut des études palestiniennes. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit. Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse Article disponible en ligne à l'adressehttps://www.cairn.info/revue-d-etudes-palestiniennes-1997-4-page-51.htm Découvrir le sommaire de ce numéro, suivre la revue par email, s'abonner... Flashez ce QR Code pour accéder à la page de ce numéro sur Cairn.info.
Os sefarditas em Israel: o sionismo do ponto de vista das vítimas judaicas, (Portuguese translation of "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims." 1988), Novos Estudos 79 (São Paulo), November 2007, pp.117- 136
Novos Estudos, 2007
Este artigo pretende incorporar uma questão pouco mencionada no discurso crítico sobre Israel e o... moreEste artigo pretende incorporar uma questão pouco mencionada no discurso crítico sobre Israel e o sionismo: a presença dos judeus árabes e orientais, os sefarditas, oriundos em grande parte de países árabes e muçulmanos. Uma análise mais completa deve incluir as conseqüências negativas do sionismo não apenas para o povo palestino, mas também para os judeus sefarditas. A rejeição sionista do Oriente palestino e árabe-muçulmano tem por ilação a rejeição dos mizrahim (os "orientais"), os quais, assim como os palestinos, também tiveram o direito de auto-representação extirpado.
Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices brings together twelve essays by Ella Shohat, the trailblazing I... moreTaboo Memories, Diasporic Voices brings together twelve essays by Ella Shohat, the trailblazing Israeli-Arab-Jewish scholar of postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies, whose key interventions in the intellec- tual debates around national discourse, hyphenated identities, feminist ...
This essay examines the paradoxical effects on Arab Jews of their two, rival essentialist nationa... moreThis essay examines the paradoxical effects on Arab Jews of their two, rival essentialist nationalisms-Jewish and Arab. It shows how the Eurocentric concept of a single 'Jewish History" cut non-Ashkenazi Jews offfrom their origins, even while the Zionist idea that Arabness and Jewishness are mutually exclusive gradually came to be shared by Arab nationalist discourse. The emergence of a new, hybrid identity of Mizrahim, as a product both of Israel's assimilationist policy and of resistance to it, is discussed. Finally, the author proposes an interdisciplinary framework-Mizrahi studies-as a way of going beyond hegemonic Zionist discourses while at the same time making a strong link to the Palestinian issue. A RECENT NEWS ITEM CONCERNING ISRAEL inadvertently points to some of the ambiguities and aporias of Mizrahi identity since the advent of Zionism. The article claimed that the Institute for Biological Research in Israel was developing a biological weapon, a kind of "designer toxin" or "ethnic bullet" tailored to attack Arabs only. (First conceived during the apartheid era in South Africa as a pigment-based weapon to be used against blacks, it was reconfigured as an ethnic, gene-based weapon by Israel.) The report, unconfirmed but relayed in the London Sunday Times, mentioned in passing that the research involved Iraqi Jews.1 What is of interest here is the symptomatic implications of a relatively "minor" aspect of the article, the alleged choice of "Iraqi Jews," in terms of some of the paradoxes of Arab Jewish identity in Israel. (By "Arab Jews" I refer to people of Jewish faith historically linked to the Arab Muslim world.) On the one hand, the Israeli establishment regards Arab Jews as irremediably Arabindeed, that Iraqi Jews were allegedly used to determine a certain toxin's effect on Arabs suggests that for genetic/biological purposes, at least, Iraqi Jews are Arabs. On the other hand, official Israeli/Zionist policy urges Arab Jews (or, more generally, Oriental Jews, also known as Sephardim or Mizrahim) to see their only real identity as Jewish. The official ideology de
... Meanwhile the bank's officers of reform are free to come and go, demanding ransoms i... more... Meanwhile the bank's officers of reform are free to come and go, demanding ransoms in the form of cuts to the social economy in exchange for further aid to business, demonstrating that discussion of corruption always requires a look at the very ... Randy Martin and Ella Shohat ...
On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings of Ella Shohat
Displacement as metonym (in the sense of actual movement from place to place) and as metaphor (in... moreDisplacement as metonym (in the sense of actual movement from place to place) and as metaphor (in the sense of comparable displacements) forms a binding thread that runs through On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements. For this reason, I found Steve Sabella’s “38 Days of ReCollection” (2014) to suggestively convey the thrust of this book, and selected it for the cover. The basic material of Sabella’s Re-Collection” series -B & W photo emulsion spread on swashes of color paint scraped from the interior walls of houses in Jerusalem’s Old City -strangely parallels this book project itself, also composed of fragments gathered from several decades of work and now “housed” in this collection. The stand-alone materiality of the piece, literally extracted from a wall, conveys a layered history through palpable layers of paint. The scraped paint with its several strata of color, forms a literal palimpsest, testifying as it were to the various hands that had painted each one. The turquoise in particular evokes the greenish shades of the wall paint color commonly preferred by indigenous communities of the region (whether Muslims, Christians, or Jews) to protect against the evil spirits. Scraping thus becomes both an act of excavation of the buried substrata of forgotten lives, as well as a means to visualize again intermingled lives.
As a way of beginning our conversation, I'd like to cite Samir Amin's article published in the Eg... moreAs a way of beginning our conversation, I'd like to cite Samir Amin's article published in the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram Weekly [in spring 2003], entitled "The American Ideology." Amin makes important criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, mostly in the mould of materialist analysis of economic and political interests. But he also offers an ahistorical account of American history, cast in culturalist and essentialist terms. For example, Amin describes U.S. neoimperialism as rooted in the biblical, Judaic foundations of Protestantism that "facilitated the conquest of new continents by grounding its legitimacy in scriptures" and, later, extended this God-given mission "to encompass the entire globe with its predilection for apocalyptic fantasies." Consequently, he argues, "Americans have come to regard themselves as the 'chosen people,' in practice a synonym for the Nazi term Herrenvolk." American imperialism, Amin concludes, is even more brutal than its predecessors, since "most imperialists, after all, do not claim to have been invested with a divine mission." Amin offers an exclusivist argument for U.S. behavior, rather than seeing it as part of a broader colonialist pattern in the Americas as a whole. As for his culturalist version of U.S. history, it is a reductionist and, at times, uninformed account, oblivious to the complexity of the many contradictory forces, movements, and ideologies that have shaped the U.S. state. Even the title, "The American Ideology," suggests that there is one kind of an essence to the Anglo-American spirit, and one kind of ideology. Khalidi: I would be very wary of talking about Protestantism, even, as if it were a monolith. There are apocalyptic and eschatological aspects to some strands of Protestantism, and then there are universalist, charita
While the ethnic/religious term "Arab-Jew" has at the very least been the object of hea... moreWhile the ethnic/religious term "Arab-Jew" has at the very least been the object of heated debate and polemics, the linguistic/cultural term "Judeo- Arabic," paradoxically, has been widely accepted as a legitimate object of scholarly inquiry-especially within the realm of Jewish studies. Most languages, including the languages or dialects spoken by Jews, are palimpsestically complex and layered with various linguistic strata. Yet the case of Judeo-Arabic raises complex questions. This complexity is partially traceable to the persistence of the "Arab versus Jew" dichotomy, as well as to the corollary negation of the "Judeo-Muslim" hyphen, which had been crucial for the genealogy of Arabic written and spoken by Jews for millennia. Against the conceptual binary that mandates that "Jew" and "Arab" be antonyms, I argue that the linguistic/cultural question of "Judeo-Arabic" is inseparable from the ethnic/religious concept of the "Arab-Jew." My argument here is premised on my earlier critique of the taboos against joining the word "Jewishness" with the word "Arabness" (a taboo encapsulated in the very term "Arab-Jew") as well as against joining the word "Judeo" with the word "Muslim" (encapsulated in the "Judeo-Muslim"). That critique has been central to my scholarly work over the past three decades. Does the good/bad bifurcation between the terms "Arab-Jew" and "Judeo-Arabic" as objects of analysis reflect a different ideational status of the hyphen in the two terms (i.e., linking Jews to Arabs in the case of "the Arab-Jew" while delinking a Jewish language from Arabic in the case of "Judeo-Arabic")? Rather than take for granted "Judeo-Arabic" as a fixed natural language, I argue that the term-like "Arab-Jew"-requires a critical engagement. Both terms are equally entangled in the anxiety provoked by the idea of an Arab cultural genealogy for a Jewish identity.This essay does not concern itself with the extremely rich, indeed invaluable, scholarship in the related fields of "Judeo-Arabic" and "Jewish languages." Rather, it attempts to examine the implications of these terms, assumptions, and axioms for identity mapping. The essay interrogates the premises and conceptual frameworks associated with the rubric of "Judeo- Arabic language." If Jewish studies scholars have tended to conceive "Judeo- Arabic" within a ghettoizing approach to the history and culture of "the Jews," scholars within Arab studies have treated it with skepticism. Arab studies scholars ask, in effect, whether Judeo-Arabic even has any actual existence apart from its source language-Arabic. Rather than divide these two zones of inquiry, I hope to bring them into dialogue through addressing some of the specificities of Arabic written and spoken by Jews. In doing so, I cast doubt on the view of "Judeo-Arabic" as always-already belonging to the separate realm of "Jewish languages," which is itself arguably a newly invented and in some ways problematic category. At times, scholarly discussions within Jewish studies have acknowledged the difficulty that the "Jewish languages" rubric poses for linguistics scholars. Often, however, these projects have gone beyond invoking this category as a sociolinguistic classification to embracing "the uniquely Jewish" character of an increasingly expanding number of "Jewish languages of the Diaspora."1 Both the qualitative and quantitative procedures assume Jewish linguistic uniqueness, implicitly homologizing the idea of a unified national expression. This essay, in contrast, highlights multiple relations, addressing "Jewish languages" generally and "Judeo- Arabic" more specifically as linked not merely to other "Jewish languages," but also to any number of related languages and similar dialects within the various cultural geographies from which they emerged. I address the case of "Judeo-Arabic" simultaneously in relation to the notions of "Jewish languages" (safot yehudiyot in Hebrew) and of "Arabic dialects" (al-lahjat al-'arabiyya in Arabic). …
L’opposition des universitaires à la guerre du Golfe (1991) a mobilisé bon nombre de termes famil... moreL’opposition des universitaires à la guerre du Golfe (1991) a mobilisé bon nombre de termes familiers – « impérialisme », « néocolonialisme », « néoimpérialisme » – dans une contreoffensive contre le Nouvel Ordre Mondial. Mais un terme a brillé par son absence – le terme « postcolonial » – même dans les discours des personnalités les mieux connues qui l’employaient d’habitude. Étant donnée l’extraordinaire circulation du terme dans les colloques universitaires, les publications et les nouveau..
... This link, both metonymic and metaphoric, had been a staple of didactic Israeli films (Hill 2... more... This link, both metonymic and metaphoric, had been a staple of didactic Israeli films (Hill 24 ... But since Middle Eastern Jews spoil the image of Israel as a Western country, interviews were ... A Line in the Sand, featured Peter Jennings standing upon a colorful political map of the ...
A Reluctant Eulogy: Fragments from the Memories of an Arab-Jew
Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation
... Tali hon! ... My dress stained with mud, I ran to the house, only to find myself speaking wit... more... Tali hon! ... My dress stained with mud, I ran to the house, only to find myself speaking with a military policeman searching for my shy and muscular uncle, Nachman.(His older sisters named him after Haim Nachman Bialik, the Hebrew national poet, who years later became known ...
![The visit of King Faisal | to the Jewish community in 1924. Hakham Sasson Khdhuri, front row fourth from right.[5]](/image.pl?url=https%3a%2f%2ffigures.academia-assets.com%2f66175124%2ffigure_005.jpg&f=jpg&w=240)
![Hakham Sasson Khdhuri attending a graduation ceremony in the Jewish School, Frank Einy, Baghdad, early 1960s[10]](/image.pl?url=https%3a%2f%2ffigures.academia-assets.com%2f66175124%2ffigure_006.jpg&f=jpg&w=240)
![[Iraqi Jews arriving in Israel in 1951. Image from Wikipedia] Ella Habiba Shohat](/image.pl?url=https%3a%2f%2ffigures.academia-assets.com%2f59892023%2ffigure_001.jpg&f=jpg&w=240)
![Cover of Evelyn Alsultany and Ella Shohat, "Between the Vliddie East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Jiaspora"]](/image.pl?url=https%3a%2f%2ffigures.academia-assets.com%2f60197055%2ffigure_001.jpg&f=jpg&w=240)