A Migrant from an Imaginary Empire: Manfred Winkler’s Hebrew Poetry

What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) and Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant

Reviewed by: Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema by Rachel Harris Michal Raizen Rachel Harris. Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. Pp. 336, 5 b/w illus, 29 color images. Paper, ebook, $35.99. ISBN 9780814339671, ISBN 9780814339688. Rachel Harris’ Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema offers a nuanced and timely index of feminist filmmaking in Israel. Harris situates her analysis vis-à-vis the broad socio-historical context of Israeli filmmaking from the early nationalistic feature films of the 1950s to contemporary films that self-reflexively engage international conversations on the moving image, its production and reception. She also traces a creative arc from proto-feminist films of the 1980s to the emergence of women auteurs in our contemporary moment. Scholars in the fields of Israel Studies, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Film Studies, Jewish Studies, and Cultural Studies will appreciate the breadth of perspective offered by Harris. Warriors, Witches, Whores references an extensive body of feminist film scholarship, from Laura Mulvey’s work on scopophilia and voyeurism to Mary Devereaux’s concept of the male-dominated cinematic gaze to Claire Johnston’s formulation of counter-cinema. Harris then brings these ideas to bear on the Israeli context, noting how the gendered aspects of spectatorship and camera work have been filtered through the Zionist metanarrative. Building on feminist film scholarship from Israel, such as Orly Lubin’s work on body and territory, Nurith Gertz’s writing on traumatic memory, and Yael Munk’s exploration of the documentary as a gateway to feminist feature films, Harris then shows how Israeli feminist filmmaking in recent years has, in form and content, presented a challenge to the predominance of male-centered cine-writing and industry conventions. Warriors, Witches, Whores is divided into three sections. The chapters included in the first section address the ways in which female perspectives and characters, when incorporated into representations of conflict and militarization, dislodge the frames of reference that situate war narratives as an exclusively masculine domain of cinematic expression. Harris takes as her point of departure films set against the backdrop of the Gulf War. Chapter 1 looks at how a foregrounding of domestic spaces, traditionally the domain of female and queer perspectives, offers an alternate vantage point from which to narrate the experience of conflict. Chapter 2 explores films released during or shortly after the Second Intifada and the types of female solidarities that form along the interstices of language and territory. Harris places a distinct emphasis on encounters between Arab and Jewish female protagonists and the type of dialogue that unfolds in liminal spaces. Chapter 3 considers depictions of women in the Israeli Defense Forces and reflects on the trope of bearing arms as alternately empowering and sexualizing. The second section of Warriors, Witches, Whores looks at how feminist filmmaking in Israel has come to function as a restorative storytelling space for muted and marginalized female voices. Chapter 4 probes narrative and discursive underpinnings of films featuring the religious community in Israel. Harris identifies two strands of representation: The first involves [End Page 218] a voyeuristic gaze at the private workings of religious domestic life. The second offers a nuanced departure from frames of reference that posit female agency and religious life as mutually exclusive. In Chapter 5, Harris explores everyday sites of resistance in films that she groups under the rubric of “ethnic-feminist filmmaking.” The folkloric traditions of ethnically marginalized groups represented in such films are cinematically refigured as binding agents for multi-generational female resistance to patriarchal norms. Chapter 6 opens with an analysis of films dominated by the “virgin/whore dialectic,” according to which women could fall into one of two categories of representation—the fertile body as a territory ripe for conquest or the prostituted and problematically raced body as a project for patriarchal recuperation. Harris then traces the dismantling of this dialectic by feminist filmmakers who represent women’s sexuality and pleasure from a female perspective. The third section of Warriors, Witches, Whores takes into account how feminist cinema in Israel folds activism into its purview and becomes an avenue for social change. Chapter 7 examines representations of rape and sexual...

This article examines digital stories about migration journeys produced by students in a mainstream upper secondary class in Norway. The digital stories were introduced as part of a social studies module designed to foster critical thinking around migration. The class was made up of ethnic Norwegian students, students with a family migration background, and recently arrived migrant students. Using multimodal analysis, we examined the storylines in the students’ digital stories, focusing on the understandings of migration and nation produced. Inspired by Bamberg’s (2004) conceptualisation of dominant and counter narratives, we explored the extent to which these understandings interpellated/resisted dominant narratives of migration and nation. We asked: What understandings of the migrant and of Norway do the storylines re/produce? To what extent do these understandings draw on dominant Norwegian narratives of migration? Our findings suggest that most of the digital stories draw on dominant narratives, especially that of Norway as an idealised model state. In conclusion, we discuss possible reasons for the narrative standardisation and suggest potential ways of opening up educational spaces for more counter narratives.

This paper examines how the US-Pakistani Muslimahs or Muslim women live in the US after US Invasion of Iraq (2003) in Shaila Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams (2009). In the novel, Abdullah depicts her characters as victims of the 9/11 attacks to challenge US dominance in 9/11 narratives, which tend to show how the US becomes the victim, instead of the perpetrator of the US invasion of Iraq. By engaging with postcolonialism and 9/11 studies, this paper questions US anti-Muslim racism, which tends to associate Muslims with terrorism by exploring the ideas of trauma of being attacked by US extremists. This paper found that Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams depicts US Pakistani Muslimah struggling to seek social justice and US belonging. In doing so, this novel resists anti-Muslim racism by depicting its protagonists as facing several trauma, which is ironically continued by her next generation, who is suffering from multiple born defect representing their endless traumatic experiences living in the US after US invasion of Iraq. By exploring US-Pakistani-Muslimah stories, this novel suggests how the Pakistani Muslim diaspora not only struggles to live in the US after the US invasion of Iraq but also faces multiple trauma, especially being attacked by US extremists. This multiple trauma work to question US-trauma centric in dominant narratives. Thus, it is important to investigate traumatic stories from marginal experiences to undermine dominant narratives, which tend to exclude marginal memories after US invasion of Iraq from US belonging.

The discourse on the 'Islamization' of laws in the legal systems of post-colonial Muslim states is dominated by two conflicting narratives. The dominant Western narrative views the Islamization of laws as the reincarnation of narrow and archaic laws embodied in discriminatory statutes. In contrast, the dominant narrative of political Islam deems it as the cure-all for a range of social, political and economic ills afflicting that particular Muslim state. This Paper presents a deeper insight into the Islamization of Pakistan's law. Pakistan has three decades of experience with incorporating shari'a law into its Common Law system, an experience which has been characterized by a constant struggle between the dominant Western and Islamist narratives. Pakistan's experience helps us deconstruct the narratives and discourses surrounding Islamization and understand that the project of incorporating Islamic laws in a modern Muslim society must be based upon indigenous demands and undertaken in accordance with the organically evolving norms of recognition, interpretation, modification and enforcement in that society. Furthermore, substantive law cannot be understood or enforced outside of a legal system, its legal culture(s) and professional discourse(s), and of the broader socio-political dialectics that give context and relevance to it. Therefore, we need to shift focus to the systemic problems deeply ingrained in Pakistan's legal system that allow law and legal processes to be used to prolong disputes and cause harassment. Islamic legality can, in fact, play a significant role in breaking down the resistance that vested interests may offer to such a restructuring of the legal system along more egalitarian lines.

Reviewed by: Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century "British" Literary Canons Laura E. Donaldson Karen R. Lawrence , ed. Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century "British" Literary Canons. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1992. viii + 291 pp. $42.50 cloth, $15.95 paper. In an era when too many anthologies have very inconsistent scholarly qualility, it is a pleasure to read one whose essays are not only uniformly excellent, but also reveal new insights into the politics of literary canon formation. While the addition of writings by women, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians to the existing canon have irrevocably enlarged its boundaries, Decolonizing Tradition challenges the notion of boundary itself and, in so doing, makes visible how canons come to assume a publicly naturalized shape. Editor Karen Lawrence succinctly summarizes how the anthology as a whole foregrounds this process: Although diverse, these essays seek to analyze and complicate the geometry of cultural inclusion and exclusion in twentieth-century British literature. They take up challenges to the British literary tradition which have been mounted on a number of fronts: by writers interrogating the cultural implications of generic boundaries; by feminist writers plotting gender in relation to tradition, often in conjunction with other categories such as race and class; by multicultural [End Page 400] ticultural writers whose work emerges from and addresses the postcolonial condition. I would add to this list a structure that allows the essays in each of the anthology's three parts—"The Politics Of Genre, "Cultural Legitimation: The Cases of Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Waves, and "Postcolonial Configurations"—to comment upon each other. For example, one could read Derek Attridge's brilliant analysis of J. M. Coetzee's Foe as an answer to Ian, the teen-aged nephew of Lillian Robinson ("Canon Fathers and Myth Universe"), who several times passed over a regular babysitting customer because "she's just writing some book about women in the French Revolution." When Robinson asked why he was so prepared to dismiss this work, Ian replied: "It can't be very important. I mean, / never heard of any women in the French Revolution!" Of course, a more sophisticated version of this view circulated in male-dominated English departments for decades and negatively impacted the scholarship, promotion, and tenure of many nascent feminist intellectuals. In his essay, "Oppressive Silence: J. M. Coetzee's Foe and the Poliitcs of the Canon," Attridge points to the suppressed premise of Ian's response: It is a necessary property of any canon that it depends on what it excludes, and since culture as we understand it could not exist without canonic processes at all levels of its functioning there is no question of eradicating this source of exclusion. To be made aware of it, however, is to be reminded of the violence always implied in canonization, in the construction of cultural narratives, in the granting of a voice to one individual or one group, necessary and productive as that process is. For Attridge, then, canon formation is as much shaped by aporias as it is by a positive content—a definition which, if adopted, would revolutionize how we come to recognize and validate the "straight rule" of literary norms. Other essays have different variations on this theme. For example, Celeste Schenck's '"Corinna Sings: Women Poets and the Politics of Genre," attends to the ways in which constructing genre as both "drenched in ideologies" and "power-conferring agents" possesses important implications for understanding the exclusion of women poets from the canon. In her exploration of the epithalamium in terms of this double-edged process, Schenck addresses not only the masculinist ideology of this traditional ode to the bride—its exaltation of patriarchal marriage and its regulation of female sexuality—but also the way women poets have seized and transformed it in order to appropriate an authority long denied them. Women's momentary seizure of the epithalamium marks only the transitory empowerment of a "newly privileged group," however, and does not absolve them from the question of the genre's canonical silencings. As Schenck notes, its "class-burdened, heterosexist imagery" spawns an exclusionary politics that makes working-class, racially marked and...

A Gathering for Our Time:The Dream of the Poem as an Anthology Jonathan P. Decter Peter Cole's The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 offers fresh translations of a rich corpus of Hebrew verse, some known to English reading audiences, some presented here for the first time. In addition to establishing himself as a fine poet in his own right, Cole had already applied his poetic talent to translating select poems of two of the great Hebrew poets of al-Andalus, Samuel Ha-Nagid and Solomon Ibn Gabirol. His translation style mixes the contemporary with the archaic, eschewing the Elizabethan and Victorian styles of earlier translators (what Cole calls a "wax-museum-like school of translation", 17), abandoning the rhyme of the original, but nonetheless preserving many idioms and allusions strange to the English ear within a sound world that gives that same ear thrill, aiming first and foremost to re-create something of the original's power and force. But it is not Cole's translation method that I wish to address here - this [End Page 167] is best left to other translators. Rather, I wish to discuss The Dream of the Poem as an anthology, pointing first to a few of the early English anthologies (between 1851 and 1917) that include the Hebrew poets of Spain, and then returning to the contemporary intellectual, cultural and political worlds to which Cole's volume speaks most eloquently.1 Of all literary forms, the anthology might appear, at first glance, to be the one in which an author comments least upon the material being presented (whether the editor includes texts in the original language only, his or her own translations, or the translations of others). Especially when there are no introductory or critical notes, it would seem that the compiler simply brings together materials as they truly exist, allowing the reader an opportunity for a convenient perusal of literary history. Yet, in the very process of sifting through materials and selecting texts, giving certain authors greater representation than others, choosing principles of organization and juxtaposing texts in specific orderings, the anthologist creates a narrative of literary history and suggests meaning.2 No anthology can escape being a partial representation of a literary corpus, and every anthology is shadowed by its own "anti-anthology" - the body of texts not selected. Anthologies are written for their own historical moments. They generally presume, seek to create, or have the effect of creating literary canons, collections of texts from bygone eras deemed relevant to a contemporary community for preservation and interpretation. The selection of texts can be informed by any number of motivating factors that pertain to aesthetic criteria, moral standards, modes of self-representation, nationalism, and the intended use of texts (performative, contemplative, devotional, etc.). It has been argued convincingly that many literary canons were established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to establish the boundaries of communities; Gregory Jusdanis writes, "[T]he canon serves as a utopian site [End Page 168] of continuous textuality in which a nation, a class, or an individual may find an undifferentiated identity" (59). In the case of nations, canons -and anthologies with them- allow for a staking out of intellectual territory that parallels physical territorial claims. Jewish anthologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served as sites for the exploration of cultural identities, especially as Jews increasingly identified themselves as a "nation" whose past could be reconstructed and reclaimed in the same way as that of the German, French or Greek nations. This was the case whether the anthologies were produced in German by scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism), in Hebrew by Zionist intellectuals, or in English by British and American scholars, rabbis, and translators, though each type of anthology imagined community differently and was directed toward a different purpose. An anthology could stand as a monument to a religious past within a modern, secular Jewish context or could be collected for devotional purposes in the spirit of religious revival; it could demonstrate the Jewish contribution to universal quests for truth and beauty or could stress a singular fascination with the...

Reviewed by: The Budding of Modern Hebrew Creativity in Babylon, and: The Collected Essays of Rabbi Shelomo Bekhor Hutsin Yair Mazor The Budding of Modern Hebrew Creativity in Babylon, by Lev Hakak. Or Yeudah: The Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center, 2003. 372 pp. (in Hebrew). The Collected Essays of Rabbi Shelomo Bekhor Hutsin, by Lev Hakak. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2005. 281 pp. (in Hebrew). Numerous scholars, students, and even laypersons who display interest in Hebrew literature are well acquainted with Haskalah/Enlightenment Hebrew literature and scholarship from the late 18th through the 19th century, first in Italy and Austria, and later in Russia and Poland. That literature and scholarship (in various fields of study, such as Hebrew philology, biblical commentary, science, history, poetry, prose, drama) has been justly considered the bedrock of modern Hebrew literature and scholarship. As much as this statement is undoubtedly valid, however, it does injustice to the Hebrew poetry, epistolary writings, and periodicals produced in Babylon/Iraq during the Enlightenment. In other words, very few Hebrew poets, writers, and scholars have been acquainted with this treasure of Hebrew writings which greatly enrich the body of Hebrew Enlightenment literature. In this respect, the two books here, besides their scholarly worthiness per se, blaze a trail in Hebrew literature study and call attention to an enormous portion of Hebrew literature (notably poetry) that has been regretfully neglected. The Budding of Modern Hebrew Creativity in Babylon casts a novel and insightful light notably on poets who were prolifically active during the Enlightenment period in Babylon. The vast majority of Haskalah Hebrew literature in Babylon is associated with the Jewish religion, the laws of the Jewish culture, Biblical commentary, and liturgical poetry. During the Enlightenment [End Page 207] period over 2000 poems were written; these were fruitfully influenced by the Hebrew poetry of Spain during the middle ages as well as by Biblical texts. The great merit of The Budding of Modern Hebrew Creativity in Babylon is the author's capacity to discuss poems aesthetically while simultaneously presenting the biographical, social, scholarly, and ideological backgrounds in which the poems are rooted. It may be quite cogent to argue that the second book, The Collected Essays of Rabbi Shelomo Bekhor Hutsin, complements the previous book. This book contains two parts. The first addresses Rabbi Hutsin's educational and cultural background—his activities, his publishing house and bookstore, the periodicals in which he published his writings in conformity with Haskalah/Enlightenment ideas, his relations with Jewish scholars and writers in Eastern Europe, and the style and structure of his epistles and liturgical poetry. The second part of the book introduces Rabbi Hutsin's epistles in the way they were printed in a variety of periodicals that endorsed Haskalah. Dr. Hakak's two books may be justly considered highly valuable works of scholarship that bring to light worthy poetry and poetic periods without which the story of the evolution of Hebrew literature and culture would not be complete. Yair Mazor Hebrew Studies Program University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Copyright © 2007 Purdue University

The Politics of Haunting and Memory evocatively promises to explore the unknowable moment between life and death and the affective role of memory and memorialization. Drawing on Derrida's conceptualization, Jessica Auchter defines hauntology as the blurring of the border between life and death and the living intersection between biopolitics and thanatopolitics and explores how these hauntologies interact with statecraft, providing the international relations bent to the research. She writes: Hauntology allows us to look for ghosts in places other than the marginalized interstices of international politics and acknowledges their hauntings in life, in death, and in the very ontological construction of meaning of life and death, and the power at play that is implicated in drawing these lines. (p. 25) Auchter's study fleshes out this theory, drawing primarily on Jenny Edkins' (2003) work on memory and trauma, and Brent Steele's (2013) work on the scars of violence. In many ways, Auchter's book marries the two, presenting hauntings as the memories and emotions that are evoked in confrontations with the presence of the unseeable. Auchter focuses on affective power to dislodge ontologies and to remake statecraft outside of the dominant government-sanctioned narratives in a way that demands reconciliation with memory of trauma. As such, the book is a timely contribution to work on affect in international relations (IR).

Editorial Kristin Stapleton With this issue, Twentieth-Century China is pleased to be working with a new publishing partner, the Johns Hopkins University Press, which has a distinguished record of scholarly publishing and journal management. Among its lists of outstanding journals is Late Imperial China. We look forward to a long and productive relationship with our friends at JHU Press. We also welcome Dr. Kelly Hammond of the University of Arkansas as the new book review editor. The TCC editorial board is grateful to the outgoing book review editor, Dr. Susan Fernsebner, for her years of service to the journal. All of the articles in this issue address the circulation of ideas and practices among Chinese closely connected to communities outside China, including religious, business, and scholarly communities, in the first half of the twentieth century. Analyzing the history of an early Sino-Japanese joint venture, Craig Smith argues that the Chinese and Japanese elites who at the turn of the twentieth century set up “Datong” schools for Chinese students in Tokyo and Yokohama combined Confucian learning with nationalism and “Asianism” in an effort to counter Western imperialism. Through the schools, they produced a cadre of activist students, such as Feng Ziyou and Su Manshu, who contributed to an ongoing critique of Western culture and Western aggression even as Chinese-Japanese relations deteriorated in later years. Melissa Inouye’s article explores a different stream of cultural influence over the same decades. Her study of the Chinese Christian Intelligencer, founded in 1905, demonstrates that news of the latest scientific discoveries in the world’s laboratories shared space with news about miraculous events brought about by faith in the Holy Spirit. Charismatic Protestantism offered Chinese communities a vision of modern life that included science as well as a direct relationship between and God and believers. The expansion of print culture, she shows, spread this vision across China, despite the disdain with which such intellectuals as Chen Duxiu regarded it. Chen Duxiu’s own role in shaping how “modern China” has been understood is the topic of Ya-pei Kuo’s article. In it, she examines how Chen Duxiu and other theorists of the early 1920s shaped the dominant historical narrative about the May Fourth period by formulating and circulating the idea that a coherent New Culture Movement emerged in the second half of the 1910s. Kuo argues that this handy historical formulation has obscured the heterogeneity of thought that characterized the period and has created a foundation upon which subsequent Communist history has built. The introduction to China of a liberal, capitalist-friendly practice of philanthropy is the topic of an article by John Fitzgerald and Mei-fen Kuo, who explore the career of William Yinson [End Page 1] Lee, an Australian-born businessman who introduced a range of charitable practices to Shanghai. Lee and other such returned émigrés, the authors argue, were well positioned to take upon themselves the task of regaining China’s “welfare sovereignty”—control over the sort of charitable work that foreign benevolent societies had been carrying out in China for decades amid much fanfare. Brian Moloughney’s article explores the friendship and intellectual collaboration between two scholars—Gu Jiegang, whose work laid some of the foundations of the twentieth-century reevaluation of imperial China’s cultural legacy, and Arthur W. Hummel, a missionary whose work with Gu, Moloughney argues, helped establish the modern field of China studies outside of China. The issue presents four book reviews: Faith Skiles and Helen M. Schneider review Daughter of Good Fortune by Huiqin Chen with Shehong Chen, Xin Zhang reviews Stephen Halsey’s study of the evolution of Chinese statecraft in the era of European imperialism, Di Luo reviews Mette Halskov Hansen’s work on rural boarding schools in contemporary China, and Hongmei Sun reviews Selina Lai-Henderson’s Mark Twain in China. Book reviews appear online at Project Muse (muse.jhu.edu/journal/390). [End Page 2] Copyright © 2017 Twentieth Century China Journal, Inc.

I read Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002) and its legal historical intertexts in order to nuance “fiction” as a literary category of antebellum African American writing. Specifically, I develop connections between The Bondwoman’s Narrative and US laws of slavery by thinking about the novel’s form in relation to legal citational practices. I argue that the novel encrypts and encodes legal narratives within its fictionalized accounts of verifiable “historical” events. By close reading Crafts’s alterations of such events, I compare her use of encryption to the citational practices inherent in legal precedent. This comparison yields a stronger understanding of antebellum African American authorial practices as deploying legal rhetorical strategies that resisted dominant legal narratives and generated new literary forms. I problematize the tendency to redeem law as a possible or ideal site of black belonging and to underscore the ways that authors such as Crafts encrypted their writing with rejections of law and the nation-state. Her work does so even as it rehearses a facility and engagement with legal culture that might suggest an effort to inscribe African Americans into legal frameworks and the ongoing nineteenth-century project of US nation-building. Instead of reading this complex engagement with US law as evincing an attachment to it, I argue for reading it as the rejection and radical reimagining of existing logics of authority and community.

In this study, we analyze data from surveys conducted in 2006 and 2010, tracking changes in awareness, engagement and attitudes surrounding emerging digital cultural forms over this 5-year period. Our analysis, based on results from thousands of adults around the globe, shows that not only have remixes, mashups and other forms of configurable culture become mainstream phenomena, but also that the attitudes surrounding their cultural legitimacy are shifting. While copyright industries still promote a binary theft/permission framework, many people acknowledge the validity of some appropriation, and are actively negotiating the law's limitations. Yet, those most engaged in challenging dominant copyright narratives and exploring these emergent forms are those who hold the reins of cultural power: the young, educated and wealthy.

In recent decades, Nepalis have been forced to reconsider questions of national identity, politics, cultural authenticity, and history in a rapidly changing urban landscape. Building on scholarship within geocriticism, literary geography, and postcolonial studies, this article analyzes two works of modern Nepali literature that deal with the Kathmandu neighborhood of Thamel. By setting dramas and stories in Thamel, Nepali authors lay claim to a space that no longer coincides with its prevailing discursive-literary representations as merely a “foreign” place. They do so by destabilizing dominant touristic narratives about the neighborhood and rendering it as a Nepali space, albeit one that is deeply ambivalent. To re-write Thamel in this way expands the acceptable expressions of Nepalipan (“Nepaliness”) itself. Thamel, as both material urban space and literary setting, becomes the terrain upon which, over which, and through which these fraught cultural politics are waged to validate identities that are simultaneously conflicted, cosmopolitan, and Nepali.

Abstract: This essay addresses the power of poetry to express dissenting voices in a society that demands ideological unity in the name of collective survival. The revival of Hebrew has been intimately associated with Zionist cultural politics. However, Hebrew poetry has continuously challenged the dominant ideological precepts of the political movements of Zionism. This essay focuses on reading the poetry of Bracha Serri, a feminist poet who was born in Sanaa, Yemen in 1940 and passed away in Jerusalem in 2013. The religious education of her childhood, her academic studies, and the period she spent in Northern California have inspired the unabashed and highly original feminist voice of her poems. Her religious idiom powerfully revolutionizes the patriarchal hierarchies embodied in traditional Jewish religion and produces an innovative religious language which not only addresses a divine female figure in traditional sacred language but also boldly shatters the boundaries of gender. Finally, it also uplifts the poet herself from an oppressed position dictated by gender hierarchy as well as the ethnic injustices characterizing Israeli society. Serri was not afraid to shock and to attack dominant norms. Not only is her poetry antimilitaristic but it also identifies the common interests of Palestinian women and Mizrahi Israeli women, as well as women in general. In her poetic language, she also admiringly incorporates associations from the Black struggle in the United States. Her choice to avoid publishing her poetry at leading Israeli publishing houses and journals and to instead publish most of her literary work by herself was not merely an act of dissent, but also constituted an act of decentralization by establishing a center of her own that resisted the dominant centers of power. Serri's poetry is a particularly beautiful, moving, forceful, and important voice among the voices critically responding to Zionism.

Depression memes are a widespread phenomenon across all social media platforms. To get your hit of depression memes, you can go to any number of pages on Facebook, the subreddit “2me4meirl”, where the posts that are “too real” for more mainstream subreddits go, but nevertheless counting over one million subscribers or, on Instagram, and find innumerable accounts dedicated to “sad memes”, many with tens to hundreds of thousands of followers. In a recent study, depression memes were found to be responsible for 35 per cent of the content researchers analysed in the “#depressed” hashtag on Instagram (McCosker and Gerrard). As a subculture, it is one that has truly embraced the polyvocality of memes, allowing many voices to speak at once through their lack of fixed meaning (Milner). In depression memes, polyvocality allows the user to identify with any number of anxieties affectively represented by the memes without being authentically tied to them, under the guise of irony. Therefore, depression memes find themselves being used in a myriad of ways that do not refer to a stable structure of meaning. This allows me to problematise their roles as both masks and intimate texts within an ironic meme culture.Drawing on traditional readings of irony such as Wayne C. Booth but also contemporary approaches to authenticity, mask cultures and meme culture (de Zeeuw; Tuters), this article situates depression memes specifically within neoliberal regimes of feeling, manifested both in online practices of authenticity and the subject of value (Skeggs and Yuill) and in discourses of resilience and accountability surrounding mental health (Fullagar et al.; James; McCosker). It argues that an internet depression culture based on the principles of dissimulation serves both the purpose of protection from recuperation by dominant narratives but paradoxically creates an ambiguity that generates that risk. In this way, I speak to current anxieties surrounding memes, including ambiguity, irony, and identity formation.Internet Depression Culture Intrinsic to their nature as memes, depression memes can be found in a variety of spaces, formats and platforms. The ones below (Figure 1) circulate on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram through accounts dedicated to “sadposting” or the sharing of mental illness memes. They refer to overwhelming feelings of anxiety, a lack of will to live and a desire to recover. In their recent study on hashtagging depression on Instagram, McCosker and Gerrard found memes to be responsible for a wide range of content in the “depressed” hashtag on the platform. They argue that the use of the hashtag “depressed” is primarily as a “memetic device, often with a sense of irreverence, subversiveness and pathos, but in an effort to use the connective power of the popular tag to gain attention and Likes” (McCosker & Gerrard 9). Intimacy and memes as identity performance are therefore intimately intertwined, espousing the memetic logic that there is “safety in relatability” (Ask and Abidin 844), which is dependent on “connecting to common anxieties in a pleasurable, noncompromising way” (Kanai 228).Figure 1. Depression Memes. Sources, from left to right. Top row: <https://www.instagram.com/p/Bl5p88Tg8Cw/>; <https://www.facebook.com/mentallythrillmemes/>; <https://twitter.com/animatedtext>. Bottom row: <https://lovenotlogic.tumblr.com/post/168640369069>; <https://disasterlesbian.com/post/158174792381>; <https://www.facebook.com/mentallythrillmemes>.Indeed, meme culture depends both on the notion that certain forms of content can be relied on to “gain attention and likes” and increase a user’s social capital, but can also be interpreted as intimate and private forms of expression. The popularity of depression memes is a testament to this principle, but at the heart of this culture is a usage of irony that remains ambiguous and undefined. Whether these texts can be found to reflect genuine feelings of relatability is complex, but ultimately irrelevant. As Burton remarks on the culture of Kek, “sociologically speaking”, the sharing of these memes still constitutes a cultural engagement. Therefore, what I refer to as internet depression culture must be understood not as an attitude of self-presentation, but an inter-affective network that relies on precarious and overwhelmingly ironic objects whose authenticities as intimate texts are dependent on volatile and unstable structures of meaning.Wayne C. Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony tells us that for an expression to be understood as ironic, their meaning needs to be reconstructed by the reader and intended by the author. The reader must therefore draw from the cultural and historical context of the expression to reconstruct covert meaning that the author intended. The inferential process draws from the context of the expression to give meaning to irony. Online, the cultural context in which depression memes have risen to popularity is precisely that which gives them their reason for being. To understand this, we need to realise that, for the last decade, the symptoms that depression memes cultivate have been lying dormant under the tyranny of happiness era of social media (Freitas). I tie this notion to the doctrine of authenticity behind the identity imperative of social media platforms like Facebook (Van Dijck), and contrast it to the forms of subjectivisation anonymous or pseudonym-based cultures on platforms like 4chan embody. Within this dialectic, memes have arisen as the logic of the Internet, and irony as their social contract (Tuters; Burton). New forms of sociality that manifest within this culture are necessarily ambiguous and risk-filled ones, and need to be explored.From the Happiness Effect to a New Sensibility In The Happiness Effect, Donna Freitas investigated social media usage in young adults by surveying over 800 college students about the relationship between social media and their emotional well-being. Her results allowed her to coin the term “happiness effect”, when: “young people feel so pressured to post happy things on social media”. She writes: “most of what everyone sees on social media from their peers are happy things; as a result, they often feel inferior because they aren’t actually happy all of the time” (14). Feelings of inadequacy result when users interpret what other users post to be authentically felt, despite themselves feeling “pressured” to post a certain type of content, one they do not resonate with but fabricate for the purpose of posting. Indeed, the authenticity imperative behind identity-based social media is what defines our relationship to it.Identity-based platforms like Facebook rely on allowing the user to create an identity on their site, but demand from users that the platform be used for “‘expressing who they are’, implying that users do not “perform” their identity on Facebook; they are the selves they portray on Facebook” (Kant 34). As always, this must be situated within the commercial logic behind the seemingly “free” and “public” service the platform offers. Multiplicity and having “multiple identities” (van Dijck) does not cooperate with Facebook’s platform logic because it does not produce valuable legible data which conforms to “normative, regulatory and commercially viable frameworks” (Kant 35). As Skeggs and Yuill note, the contemporary neo-liberal imperative to perform and authorize one’s value in public is more likely to produce a curated persona rather than the “authentic” self demanded by Facebook (380). The happiness effect manifests this. Despite not being legitimate, an identity must be curated to fit in with the other performed personas on the platforms, which are taken as authentic.To many, the irony that makes depression memes such as those in Figure 1 work is in their subversion of the happiness effect and the authenticity imperative. The meaning to be reconstructed in a depression meme consists in peeling back the layer that demands from us to act as the best, happiest, version of ourselves online. Simply put, it unmasks the actual authentic self behind the curated one. Therefore, the self made visible by partaking, sharing or liking depression memes is not necessarily the best one, but, fundamentally, it is a more authentic one. Indeed, it seemed that, in the early phase of its life, users were enamoured with depression memes because it released them from the burden of identity management. What emerged in this phase of the depression memes movement was the perception of a new sensibility based on a more authentic intimacy than had ever been associated with memes. Press coverage of the topic continued to celebrate the emancipatory potential of depression memes, citing the movement as reflective of a new, more sentimental public made possible by the internet (Roffman).As has been argued before by McCosker, the forms of digital intimacy that render personalised distress visible are ones entrenched in visibility and authenticity, pillars of the face culture of Facebook. Comments on memes or reviews of depression meme pages continuously cited relatability and visibility as their reason for identification with the page. Users felt that these memes allowed them to be seen online, with their mental illness, and feel intimately connected to other viewers; “it feels good to know that other people go through the same thing as me” (Figure 2). Though it is a form of public performance, the intimacy generated here feels inherently private because it relies on unravelling certain structures of meaning. This is a skill that, users imply, can only be attained by having experienced the feelings evoked in the depression memes. In these comments, intimacy is a form of identity performance, and a discourse of accountability underpins one of authenticity. Irony, though present, is quickly reconstructed and explained away into more stable structures of