Palestine Israel And The Politics Of Popular Culture

This important volume rethinks the conventional parameters of Middle East studies through attention to popular cultural forms, producers, and communities of consumers. The volume has a broad historical scope, ranging from the late Ottoman period to the second Palestinian uprising, with a focus on cultural forms and processes in Israel, Palestine, and the refugee camps of the Arab Middle East. The contributors consider how Palestinian and Israeli popular culture influences and is influenced by political, economic, social, and historical processes in the region. At the same time, they follow the circulation of Palestinian and Israeli cultural commodities and imaginations across borders and checkpoints and within the global marketplace. The volume is interdisciplinary, including the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, ethnomusicologists, and Americanist and literary studies scholars. Contributors examine popular music of the Palestinian resistance, ethno-racial “passing” in Israeli cinema, Arab-Jewish rock, Euro-Israeli tourism to the Arab Middle East, Internet communities in the Palestinian diaspora, café culture in early-twentieth-century Jerusalem, and more. Together, they suggest new ways of conceptualizing Palestinian and Israeli political culture. Contributors. Livia Alexander, Carol Bardenstein, Elliott Colla, Amy Horowitz, Laleh Khalili, Mary Layoun, Mark LeVine, Joseph Massad, Melani McAlister, Ilan Pappé, Rebecca L. Stein, Ted Swedenburg, Salim Tamari

While the scholarly study of culture as a politically contested sphere in Palestine/Israel has become an established field over the past two decades, this volume highlights some particular understudied aspects of it: the relations between Arab identity, Mizrahi identity, and Israeli nationalism; the nightclub scene as a field of encounter, appropriation, and exclusion; an analysis of the institutional and political conditions of Palestinian cinema; the implications of the intersectional relationship between gender, ethnicity and national identity in the field of popular culture, and the concrete relations between particular aesthetic forms and symbolic power. The authors come from diverse disciplines, including anthropology, architecture, ethnomusicology, history, sociology, and political science. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

In his latest book of interviews, Edward W. Said discusses the centrality of popular resistance to his understanding of culture, history, and social change. He reveals his latest thoughts on the war on terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and lays out a compelling vision for a secular, democratic future in the Middle East--and globally. Edward W. Said, a renowned cultural and literary critic, was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, and was educated there, in Egypt, and in the United States. His books include Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, Culture and Imperialism, and The Politics of Dispossession. He has also published a memoir, Out of Place. Mr. Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Lit-erature at Columbia University. In October 2001, he received the $200,000 Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. David Barsamian's interview books feature conversations with luminaries such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Edward W. Said. A regular contributor to The Progressive and Z Magazine, Barsamian's most recent interview books include Propaganda and the Public Mind and Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire, available from South End Press. He is also the author of The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting. Barsamian is the producer of the critically acclaimed program Alternative Radio.

This volume explores Arab cultural life since World War II. Chapters cover topics such as radio/TV, the press, cinema, music, theatre, popular religion, belly dance, western consumerism, sport and the Arabic language.

Music in Conflict studies the complex relationship of musical culture to political life in Palestine-Israel, where conflict has both shaped and claimed the lives of Palestinians and Jews. In the context of the geography of violence that characterizes the conflict, borders and boundaries are material and social manifestations of the ways in which the production of knowledge is conditioned by political and structural violence. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape artistic production in this context are informed by profound imbalances of power and contingent exposure to violence. Viewing expressive culture as a potent site for understanding these dynamics, the book examines the politics of sound to show how music-making reflects and forms identities, and in the process, shapes communities. The ethnography is based on fieldwork conducted in Israel and the West Bank in 2011–2012 and other excursions since then. Author has "followed the conflict" by "following the music," from concert halls to demonstrations, mixed-city community centers to Palestinian refugee camp children’s clubs, alternative urban scenes and even a checkpoint. In all the different contexts presented, the monograph is thematically and theoretically underpinned by the ways in which music is used to culturally assert or reterritorialize both spatial and social boundaries in a situation of conflict.

Ten leading scholars and practitioners of politics, political science, anthropology, Israel studies, and Middle East affairs address the theme of continuity and change in political culture as a tribute to Professor Myron (Mike) J. Aronoff whose work on political culture has built conceptual and methodological bridges between political science and anthropology. Topics include the legitimacy of the two-state solution, identity and memory, denationalization, the role of trust in peace negotiations, democracy, majority-minority relations, inclusion and exclusion, Biblical and national narratives, art in public space, and avant-garde theater. Countries covered include Israel, Palestine, the United States, the Basque Autonomous Region of Spain, and Poland. The first four chapters by Yael S. Aronoff, Saliba Sarsar, Yossi Beilin, and Nadav Shelef examine aspects of the conflict and peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, including alternative solutions. The contributions by Naomi Chazan, Ilan Peleg, and Joel Migdal tackle challenges to democracy in Israel, in other divided societies, and in the creation of the American public. Yael Zerubavel, Roland Vazquez, and Jan Kubik focus their analyses on aspects of national memory, memorialization, and dramatization. Mike Aronoff relates his work on various aspects of political culture to each chapter in an integrative essay in the Epilogue.

DIVAn anthropological study of the relationship of tourism to Israeli identities, politics, and nation-making./div

"Moving through Conflict: Dance and Politics in Israel proposes a framework for research and discussion of the changing nature of relations between Jews and Arabs as reflected in dance from the late 19th century Palestine until present-day Israel. Drawing on multiple disciplines, this book examines a variety of social and theatrical venues (communities, dance groups, evening classes, and staged performances), dance genres (folk-dancing, social dancing, and theatrical dancing) and different cultural identities (Israeli, Palestinian and American). This study is a pioneering project examining this conflict through dance. Underlying this work is a fundamental question: can the body and dance operate as non-verbal autonomous agents to mediate change in conflicting settings, transforming the "foreign" into the "familiar? Or are they bound to their culturally-dependent significance-and thus nothing more than additional sites of an embodied politics? This anthology expounds various studies on dance, historical periods, points of view and a variety of points of contact that help promote thinking about this fundamental issue. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of dance studies, sociology, anthropology, art history, education and cultural studies as well as conflict and resolution studies"--