Taboo Memories Diasporic Voices

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

Since September 11, public discourse has often been framed in terms of absolutes: an age of innocence gives way to a present under siege, while the United States and its allies face off against the Axis of Evil. This special issue of Social Text aims to move beyond these binaries toward thoughtful analysis. The editors argue that the challenge for the Left is to develop an antiterrorism stance that acknowledges the legacy of U.S. trade and foreign policy as well as the diversity of the Muslim faith and the dangers presented by fundamentalism of all kinds. Examining the strengths and shortcomings of area, race, and gender studies in the search for understanding, this issue considers cross-cultural feminism as a means of combating terrorism; racial profiling of Muslims in the context of other racist logics; and the homogenization of dissent. The issue includes poetry, photographic work, and an article by Judith Butler on the discursive space surrounding the attacks of September 11. This impressive range of contributions questions the meaning and implications of the events of September 11 and their aftermath. Contributors. Muneer Ahmad, Meena Alexander, Lopamudra Basu, Judith Butler, Zillah Eisenstein, Stefano Harney, Randy Martin, Rosalind C. Morris, Fred Moten, Sandrine Nicoletta, Yigal Nizri, Jasbir K. Puar, Amit S. Rai, Ella Shohat, Ban Wang

While the term “culture wars” often designates the heated arguments in the English-speaking world spiraling around race, the canon, and affirmative action, in fact these discussions have raged in diverse sites and languages. Race in Translation charts the transatlantic traffic of the debates within and between three zones—the U.S., France, and Brazil. Stam and Shohat trace the literal and figurative translation of these multidirectional intellectual debates, seen most recently in the emergence of postcolonial studies in France, and whiteness studies in Brazil. The authors also interrogate an ironic convergence whereby rightist politicians like Sarkozy and Cameron join hands with some leftist intellectuals like Benn Michaels, Žižek, and Bourdieu in condemning “multiculturalism” and “identity politics.” At once a report from various “fronts” in the culture wars, a mapping of the germane literatures, and an argument about methods of reading the cross-border movement of ideas, the book constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of the Diasporic and the Transnational.

In this collection, Arab and Arab American feminists enlist their intimate experiences to challenge simplistic and long-held assumptions about gender, sexuality, and commitments to feminism and justice-centered struggles among Arab communities. Contributors hail from multiple geographical sites, spiritualities, occupations, sexualities, class backgrounds, and generations. Poets, creative writers, artists, scholars, and activists employ a mix of genres to express feminist issues and highlight how Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives simultaneously inhabit multiple, overlapping, and intersecting spaces: within families and communities; in anticolonial and antiracist struggles; in debates over spirituality and the divine; within radical, feminist, and queer spaces; in academia and on the street; and among each other. Contributors explore themes as diverse as the intersections between gender, sexuality, Orientalism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism, and the restoration of Arab Jews to Arab American histories. This book asks how members of diasporic communities navigate their sense of belonging when the country in which they live wages wars in the lands of their ancestors. Arab and Arab American Feminisms opens up new possibilities for placing grounded Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives at the center of gender studies, Middle East studies, American studies, and ethnic studies.

When the Hebrew edition of this groundbreaking book came out, it provoked a stormy public debate. The author has now up-dated "Israeli Cinema", adding a substantial new postscript that reflects on the book's initial reception and points to exciting new trends in the cinematic representation of Israel and Palestine. Ella Shohat explores the cinema as a productive site of national culture, dating back to the early Zionist films about turn-of-the-century Palestine. She offers a deconstructionist reading of Zionism, viewing the cinema as itself participating in the 'invention' of the nation. Unthinking the Eurocentric imaginary of 'East versus West', Shohat highlights the paradoxes of an anomalous national/colonial project through a number of salient issues, including the Sabra figure as a negation of the 'Diaspora Jew', the iconography of the land of Israel as a denial of Palestine, and the narrative role of 'the good Arab'. The new postscript examines the emergence of a richly multiperspectival cinematic space that transcends earlier dichotomies through a palimpsestic and cross-border approach to Israel/Palestine.

Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective is the first sustained study of gender-consciousness in the Palestinian creative imagination. Drawing on concepts from postcolonial feminist theory, Ball analyses a range of literary and filmic works by major creative practitioners including Michel Khleifi , Liana Badr, Annemarie Jacir, Elia Suleiman, Mona Hatoum and Suheir Hammad, and reveals a hitherto unrecognized trajectory in gender-consciousness under development in the Palestinian imagination from the start of the twentieth century. The book explores how these works resonate with questions of power, identity, nation, resistance, and self-representation in the Palestinian imagination more broadly, and asks how these gender-conscious narratives transform our understanding of Palestine's struggle for postcoloniality. Working at the cusp of postcolonial, feminist and cultural enquiry, Ball seeks to open up vital new directions in the interdisciplinary study of Palestine.

Tracing the transnational influences of what has been known as a uniquely American genre, “the Western,” Susan Kollin’s Captivating Westerns analyzes key moments in the history of multicultural encounters between the Middle East and the American West. In particular, the book examines how experiences of contact and conflict have played a role in defining the western United States as a crucial American landscape. Kollin interprets the popular Western as a powerful national narrative and presents the cowboy hero as a captivating figure who upholds traditional American notions of freedom and promise, not just in the region but across the globe. Captivating Westerns revisits popular uses of the Western plot and cowboy hero in understanding American global power in the post-9/11 period. Although various attempts to build a case for the war on terror have referenced this quintessential American region, genre, and hero, they have largely overlooked the ways in which these celebrated spaces, icons, and forms, rather than being uniquely American, are instead the result of numerous encounters with and influences from the Middle East. By tracing this history of contact, encounter, and borrowing, this study expands the scope of transnational studies of the cowboy and the Western and in so doing discloses the powerful and productive influence of the Middle East on the American West.