Exile and Political Activism: The Egyptian-Jewish Communists in Paris, 1950-59

Abstract

Frederick Barth’s classic essay on the social construction of ethnic boundaries is one of the landmarks in the discrediting of the notion that culture and identity are essences inherent in racially and geographically distinct ethnic groups. In opposition to the exoticist es-sentialism of many anthropologists of his day, Barth argued for the social determination of the boundaries distinguishing one ethnic group from another. The current wave of postmodern textualism, with its emphasis on “imagined communities” (see Anderson) and the “invention of ethnicity” (see Sollors), extends the Barthian anti-essentialist project even further. There is much to be gained by acknowledging the constructed character of all categories of culture, politics, and knowledge, including identity and ethnicity. But many postmodern textualists have gone too far in the direction of regarding culture as a domain to be understood in relative isolation from social determinants, and some varieties of postmodernism have dismissed the relevance of ethnic and national identity altogether. Is there a way to assimilate the insights of poststructuralist social theory while avoiding these antimaterialist and ultimately Eurocentric excesses?