Ella Shohat Research Articles

De-westernizing the gaze in Hulu’s Ramy (2019)

ABSTRACT The marginalization of the Orient in U.S. cinema has reduced the Oriental space and its inhabitants to a series of clichés and stereotypes. Based on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), several film scholars like Jack Shaheen, Ella Shohat, and Lina Khatib, among others, have demonstrated that the exclusion and the distortion of the Orient in U.S. cinema were achieved through the manipulation of Oriental music, culture, religion, and the objectification of the female figure. These cinematic representations contribute to the marginalization of the Orient while creating a Eurocentric narrative. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in their Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (2013) and Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee in their De-Westernizing Film Studies (2012) challenge this long-lasting tradition that marginalizes the Other. The Hulu TV series Ramy (2019-) by the Egyptian comedian, actor, and director Ramy Youssef attempts to de-westernize the gaze on the marginalized Muslim and Middle Eastern communities in the U.S. This article highlights how the series goes beyond the stereotypical iconography used to approach the Middle East while depicting the life of a first-generation American Muslim. It will use a comparative method and discourse analysis to examine how the show can deconstruct these clichés and offer a fresh perspective.

Проблема феномена визуальности в современном англо-американском научном дискурсе

В статье исследовано отражение феномена визуальности в современном англо-американском академическом пространстве. Особое внимание уделено освещению явления визуального поворота в исследованиях, а именно, почему внимание ученых ХХ в. привлекла визуальная культура, и как визуальность завоевывала различные социокультурные пространства. Проанализированы взаимосвязи между визуальным поворотом и привилегией зрения над другими органами чувств (окулоцентризм) и появлением новых технологий. Проникновение визуального в теорию культуры и распространение образов в самой культуре называют «визуальным поворотом» (иногда его также называют «пикториальным поворотом» или «иконическим поворотом») («pictural turn», «iconic turn»). Он был представлен в исследованиях одного из самых выдающихся теоретиков медиа и визуальной культуры У. Дж. Т. Митчелла. Со временем понятие «визуальность» успешно утвердилось не только в самой культуре, но и в других направлениях, таких как культурология, философия, социология и история, которые всебольше переплетаются через изображение. Неудивительно, что в текстах известных исследователей и теоретиков культуры, таких как Стюарт Холл, Гордон Файф, Джон Ло, Джон Питер Бёрджер, Мартин Джей, Элла Шохат, Роберт Стэм, Донна Харауэй и многих других, уделяется большое внимание изучению различных аспектов проблемы визуальности, а фокус академических исследований часто смещается на междисциплинарный уровень. В исследованиях большое внимание уделено определению визуальности и других явлений феномена видимости, онтологии зрения и видения, выявлению границ между видимым и невидимым, освещена проблема образа, теоретических свойств образа в фотографии, кинематографе, искусстве, образовании и т.д. Проблема визуального была возведена в центр новых исследований, заложен фундамент для появления новых направлений исследований, в частности визуальных. Это знаменует начало нового этапа в развитии гуманитарных исследований, когда отпростого наблюдения за тем, что мы живем в эпоху доминирования образов, мы переходим к теоретической концептуализации этого явления.

Gendered bodies: Feminism and Chineseness in the work of Li Xinmo, Xiao Lu and Xie Rong

From its emergence in the post-Mao era of gaige kaifang (Reform and Opening) the performing body in Chinese xingwei yishu (‘performance art’) was most often assumed to be male. The representation of performance practices in exhibitions, festivals – and in the art historical literature – has too often been dominated by male artists. This article turns the gaze onto three women artists, examining their work through lenses of gender, feminism and ‘Chineseness’: Performance artists Xiao Lu (b. 1962), Li Xinmo (b. 1976) and Xie Rong (b. 1983) explore aspects of embodied lived experience in often-encoded ways. Li Xinmo explores experiences of gendered violence through theatrical, immersive performances that have often used ink or pigmented fluids as metaphors for blood and trauma – and through a series of paintings made with actual menstrual blood. In The Death of the Xinkai River (2007) she first explicitly links an embodied feminism with her distress at the destruction of the natural environment. Xiao Lu’s post-menopausal performances move beyond her previously more literal explorations of gender. Works such as Ren (2016) and Suspension () employ ink and water in poetic reference to shufa (‘calligraphy’) and shuimo hua (‘ink-wash painting’). Inserting herself into the visual language of literati scholar painters, an artistic lineage from which she would have been excluded by virtue of her gender, Xiao’s liquid materiality becomes a feminist embodiment. Xie Rong (also known until recently by her English name, Echo Morgan) ‘writes’ ink painting using her hair as her brush in I Am a Brush (2011), Painting Until it Becomes Marble (2019) and Anatomy of . She paints her naked body with images of birds and flowers and blue-and-white porcelain motifs to perform lamentations of grief, loss and longing in works such as Be The Inside of the Vase (2012) and Echo of Posidonia (2022). Framed by Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ‘ornamentalism’, Ella Shohat’s notion of a non-western ‘subterranean’ feminism and early twentieth-century anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen’s gendering category of nannü, the artists’ embodied practices are understood as creating nannü spaces that reveal female subjectivities and reposition them within the discourses of Chinese performance practice. Emerging from encounters with the artists, in studio visits and (during the pandemic years) online conversations, analysis of their counter-patriarchal work reveals not merely the ghostly presences and absences of women in narratives of performance art in China that have tended to marginalize them, but also the significance of their contributions.

Queering/Querying the Text in Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Sui Sin Far's "Jamaica Works"

Queering/Querying the Text in Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Sui Sin Far's "Jamaica Works" Giselle Liza Anatol (bio) and Joo Ok Kim (bio) Although African/Jamaican novelist Patricia Powell and Chinese/ Canadian writer Sui Sin Far were born almost exactly a century apart, their artistic works are strongly linked by setting—both time and place—and the authors' forceful critiques of the British Empire and its productions of colonial knowledge.1 For Far, the empire entangled transnational links from Shanghai, where Far's English father met her Chinese mother; to England and the British dominion of Canada, where she spent her childhood; to her work as a journalist in the United States—founded as a British colony—to Jamaica, another British colony, which Canada provided with "an ongoing force of women office workers" (White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography, 32). Her writings, particularly "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian" (1909) and "The Sugar-Cane Baby" (1910), provide sharp expositions on the racialized, gendering plantation labor system and white supremacist colonial violence routed through the circuits of empire. Patricia Powell's novel The Pagoda (1999), which features a gender-queer Chinese/ Jamaican protagonist seeking firm footing in post-emancipation colonial Jamaica, holds significance in the historiography of the Chinese Americas and multiple global souths—including the U.S. South—which invites exploration beyond the book's conventional categorization as queer fiction of the Anglophone Caribbean. Thinking through the Chinese/Jamaican community as represented in Powell's novel in conjunction with Sui Sin Far's stories set in Jamaica, we explore the ways [End Page 121] both authors challenge xenophobic and imperialist regimes, particularly those predicated on knowledge production and literacy. Far's decision to "fight… battles" on behalf of Chinese people in North America by writing articles in local papers ("Leaves" 223) and Powell's artistic choice to open and close her narrative with the act of letter-writing foreground the ways that composing and deciphering all kinds of texts contribute to empire building and whether, as Audre Lorde so provocatively questioned, these "master's" tools can indeed "destroy the master's house." Like Ella Shohat, we argue for the Caribbean's significance in understanding Orientalism: the myth of Columbus's "discovery" of the so-called "New World" in 1492 can be tied to the expulsion of Muslims and Jews in Spain in the same year—commonly known as the Reconquista. The events are linked in terms of both discourses of travel and conquest and expurgatory practices. As Shohat claims, Perhaps the first modern orientalist was none other than Columbus. After his arrival in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, he wrote to the Spanish throne praising the war against both Muslims and Jews, and thanking the queen for having sent him to the regions of India to convert its people to the holy faith. Here, discourses about Muslims, Jews, and (Asian) Indians crossed the Atlantic… arming the conquistadors with a ready-made us-versus-them ideology aimed at the regions of India, but applied instead towards the indigenous peoples of the accidentally discovered continent. (47) Significantly, Shohat's argument hinges on acts of writing: Columbus's missive to the queen; his travel journals, diaries, and maps; Bibles for converting "heathens"; and later, historical accounts of empire and colonization are essential to constructions of race, geographies of the "backward" cultures of the Global South, idealized notions of the "progress" of the Global North. In U.S. history, denied or restricted access to literacy was essential—even after the abolition of slavery—to preventing Black, Indigenous, and other people of color from participating in the political sphere. Twentieth-century literacy tests, for example, served as obstacles to citizenship: barriers to African American enfranchisement and, in the form of entrance applications, impediments to Chinese immigrants' physical entry to the nation. Despite its centrality to the liberation narratives of prominent figures, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and others, literacy has been utilized for "regulation, imposition, surveillance," and other means of control that regularly "do damage or inflict harm on individuals" (Pritchard 9, Prologue). These considerations of reading, writing, and power...

The Long History of the Mizrahim: New Directions in the Study of Jews from Muslim Countries – In Tribute to Yaron Tsur; Merav Alush Levron, Under Eastern Eyes: Identity and Self Representation in Israeli Documentary Cinema

Reviewed by: The Long History of the Mizrahim: New Directions in the Study of Jews from Muslim Countries—In Tribute to Yaron Tsur by Aviad Moreno, and: Under Eastern Eyes: Identity and Self Representation in Israeli Documentary Cinema by Merav Alush Levron Dario Miccoli (bio) Aviad Moreno, Noah Gerber, Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Ofer Shiff, eds., The Long History of the Mizrahim: New Directions in the Study of Jews from Muslim Countries—In Tribute to Yaron Tsur (Sede Boker, 2021) 551pp. [Hebrew]. Merav Alush Levron, Under Eastern Eyes: Identity and Self Representation in Israeli Documentary Cinema (Tel-Aviv, 2020) 421pp. [Hebrew]. In an essay published twenty years ago, Ella Shohat—one of the scholars who contributed most to the birth of Mizrahi Studies—argued that owing to the conceptual limitations of the term Mizrahim, scholars should develop a more critical understanding of the continuities and discontinuities entailed by Middle Eastern and North African Jewish cross-border movements to and from Israel. Yet as Mizrahi Studies have developed over several decades with an almost exclusive focus on Israel and the post-1948 period, Shohat’s call to view Mizrahim through a “multi-chronotopic and palimpsestic notion of time and space” becomes a difficult challenge.1 And nevertheless, an increasing number of scholars today are examining the history of the Mizrahim from a transnational and diachronic perspective. Bryan K. Roby’s study, The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion, distinguishes several ideological junctures between the African-American civil rights movement in the United States and the Mizrahi protests of the 1960s and 1970s in Israel.2 Yuval Evri attempts to unravel a more complex genealogy of Mizrahim in The Return to Al-Andalus through the connections between Hebrew and Arabic and Jews and Arabs during the first half of the twentieth century, using Sefarad as a central category of Middle Eastern Jewish heritage.3 These studies extend the spatial framework and timespan in which Mizrahi history takes place beyond the notion of Israeli exceptionalism and inevitable associations between common events and dates like 1948, the Wadi Salib riots [End Page 190] of 1959, the founding of the Black Panthers in 1971, the electoral victory of the Likud party in 1977, and the creation of Shas in 1984. But does the era of the Mizrahim begin with the birth of the State of Israel, or should it include the pre-1948 period, or should the mass migrations of the 1950s and 1960s be our point of departure? And more importantly, how should we define Mizrahim and the past and present of a Jewish collective that did not define itself as such until the second half of the twentieth century? These are some of the issues raised in two recent works on Mizrahi history, culture and identity: The Long History of the Mizrahim: New Directions in the Study of Jews from Muslim Countries, edited by Aviad Moreno, Noah Gerber, Esther Meir-Glitzenstein and Ofer Shiff, and the monograph Under Eastern Eyes: Identity and Self Representation in Israeli Documentary Cinema by Merav Alush Levron. The first is a collection of studies in honor of Yaron Tsur, one of the most prominent Israeli historians of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish history before and after the advent of the State of Israel; the second is a monograph treating contemporary Mizrahi documentary cinema. Although these two books are very different in focus and objective, both raise questions about the perspective of Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies today and in the future. Taking a cue from the seminal reflections of social scientists like Ella Shohat, Yehudah Shenhav, Henriette Dahan-Kalev and Sami Shalom-Chetrit and of historians such as Michael Laskier, Norman Stillman and Tsur himself,4 these two volumes explore places and events from the diasporic past of the Mizrahim until Aliyah and after. As novelist Abraham Yehoshua wrote so eloquently in The Tunnel (2018), there is a “genetic strand” that binds together the generations of Middle Eastern and North African Jews, and Israel of the present day with the Sephardi and Arab Jewish worlds of old.5 The Long History of the Mizrahim is divided into three parts: the first is dedicated to inter-ethnic relations in...

What are the different ways in which we can understand gendered diasporic identities?

Gender studies has facilitated the exploration of Aids and Migration among other social problems, and has enabled a more sensible understanding of the discrimination practices that exist around them. This paper will discuss the aspects in which gender studies have contributed to assess issues regarding migration from the gendered diaspora perspective. This sociological construction of diaspora encompasses the many different reasons why migrants decide to leave their country, bounded by national, racial or ethnic background, which enroll in a strong political motivation. Although in this essay, the theoretical discussion will embrace male gendered diasporas as well, critics of the term have questioned how gendered diasporas have been traditionally understood of men. The first part of the discussion will be guided by the question: what is a gendered diaspora identity? The essay will emphasise the gendered category of analysis. I will argue how gendered identities are constructed under the circumstances of dominance and oppression that result from displacement. First, the deconstruction of the social category of gendered diaspora will be assessed, through an examination of Ella Shohat ́s agreement of identity. The essay will then examine the term diaspora and its ambivalences and criticisms. The second part of the discussion will consider three separate cases of how gendered diasporic identities are being understood, including: the cultural representations of Cuban Americans, the Sikh diaspora and Armenian women in Los Angeles.

The Pioneer Paradigm

This essay considers the deployment of a nineteenth-century white-supremacist imaginary within popular culture and, more curiously, within feminist media historiography. Tracing the paradoxical figure of the “female film pioneer” to groundbreaking work by Ally Acker and Jane Gaines in the 1990s, I historicize how the “pioneers” initially functioned as strategic interventions in a white masculinist landscape, but argue that they have since become naturalized in post-millennial digital culture and are (mis)shaping the discourse of the field. Leaning on foundational texts by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam and Emma Pérez, this paper intervenes in the pioneer paradigm so prevalent in the study of the silent film era—and in discourse on female film and video makers more generally—calling for a proliferation of metaphors to provoke new insights into the very real challenges facing feminists in the present.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Muslims, Moriscos, and Arabic-Speaking Migrants in the New World

This essay reviews the following works:Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora. Edited by Evelyn Alsultany and Ella Shohat. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 334. $30.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780252083631.

El Santo vs. Mystery Science Theater 3000: Lucha Libre’s Transnational Journey into American Popular Culture

Foreign cinemas have often been positioned as higher-brow alternatives to Hollywood fare, yet every national cinema has some manner of skeleton in the closet. For Mexico, the mass-produced Santo films—starring masked luchador El Santo, who fought off a bevy of monsters in over fifty films throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies—epitomized the divide between beloved popular culture artifact and shameful counterpoint to national cinematic narrative. Due to the films’ lowbrow status in Mexico, they traveled easily into new, similarly lowbrow international spaces, including American drive-ins, late-night television, and Mystery Science Theater 3000. Yet, while the films appeared in these new formats with their nationality largely deemphasized, their Mexicanness was in fact an essential component of the infantilization through which most audiences in the United States and Canada approached them. Drawing on Jeffrey Sconce’s work on paracinema; Ella Shohat’s and Dolores Tierney’s notions of racial and colonialist cinematic readings; and Heather Levi’s, Andrew Syder’s, and Tierney’s histories of El Santo, this article identifies the imperialist attitudes that characterized initial transnational encounters between North Americans and the Santo films, as well as how those frameworks influenced later depictions of lucha libre outside of Mexico even decades later.

Corporeal Identities, Maternal Artivism: A New Decolonial Approach to the Study of Latin American Women Artists

Stemming from Grosfoguel’s decolonial discourse, and particularly his enquiry on how to steer away from the alternative between Eurocentric universalism and third world fundamentalism in the production of knowledge, this article aims to respond to this query in relation to the field of the art produced by Latin American women artists in the past four decades. It does so by investigating the decolonial approach advanced by third world feminism (particularly scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty) and by rescuing it from—what I reckon to be—a methodological impasse. It proposes to resolve such an issue by reclaiming transnational feminism as a way out from what I see as a fundamentalist and essentialist tactic. Following from a theoretically and methodological introduction, this essay analyzes the practice of Cuban-born artist Marta María Pérez Bravo, specifically looking at the photographic series Para Concebir (1985–1986); it proposes a decolonial reading of her work, which merges third world feminism’s nation-based approach with a transnational outlook, hence giving justice to the migration of goods, ideas, and people that Ella Shohat sees as deeply characterizing the contemporary cultural background. Finally, this article claims that Pérez Bravo’s oeuvre offers the visual articulation of a decolonial strategy, concurrently combining global with local concerns.

ELLA SHOHAT, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings (London: Pluto Press, 2017)

Author Biography: Jennifer Lynn Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, US empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity. She is currently completing the manuscript for her first book, a multi-sited ethnographic study of solidarity tourism in Palestine.

Gendering the Arab-Jew: Feminism and Jewish Studies after Ella Shohat

Gendering the Arab-Jew:Feminism and Jewish Studies after Ella Shohat Shir Alon (bio) Setting out to write an essay about cultural theorist Ella Shohat's influence on Jewish Studies over the past 30 years, I couldn't help but wonder (perhaps a bit maliciously) what Shohat, who debuted in academia with an unprecedented study of Israeli cinema from a postcolonial feminist perspective,1 would say about the recent, so-called Jewish Studies film Footnote (2011). Given that it centers on quarrels between Jewish philologists, Footnote was a surprising success both in Israel and at international festivals, even nominated for an Academy Award.2 No doubt its depiction of the relationship between two generations of Talmud scholars, father and son, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem struck a (local and international) chord. Armed with a theatrical soundtrack and humorous voice-over, the film narrates contemporary Jewish Studies as an Oedipal struggle between Ashkenazi men over official recognition, embodied in the Israel Prize. Women are assigned supportive roles as wives and mothers (alas, they occasionally dare not to be supportive enough!). One scene in particular seems to give a knowing wink to the viewing Jewish scholar, as the soundtrack gives way to a squabble, overheard at a cocktail party, about Daniel Boyarin's feminized Jewish man.3 Nevertheless, the pleasure is somewhat bitter if that scholar happens to be a woman, since Boyarin is employed merely to enforce the story of Jewish modernity as a story of masculinity. Whether it is a masculinity gained or lost depends on what flavor of masculinity you favor, but what is certain is that women remain irrelevant to it.4 [End Page 57] It is only fitting that the plot of the film rises and falls on a dramatic philological inquiry into the word metsudah, "fortress," since it presents Jewish Studies as a bastion of white men surrounded by resolute gatekeepers. Women, Mizrahi Jews, or Jerusalem's Palestinians are absent from the university citadel on the hill. What we do see, again and again, are the expressionless security guards standing at every door, profiling those attempting to enter. These guards, ubiquitous in Israeli public spaces since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, are the one visual reference in the film to Israel's ongoing regime of separation. To anyone working in the field of Jewish Studies, the film's image of the discipline is clearly anachronistic: the walls of the fortress have been breached (though not toppled). Work done over the past 40 years has introduced both new research approaches and new objects of study, in dynamic exchange with critical gender, race, and ethnic studies, as well as vital criticism of Jewish Studies' commitment to a Zionist telos. Ella Shohat's writing, taking place at the intersection of Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and critical race scholarship, directly and indirectly inspired many of these changes. The recent publication of an anthology of her collected writing spanning the past 30 years provides an occasion to assess her influence on the field.5 It seems instructive to position Shohat's intervention alongside Boyarin's, since both have utilized postcolonial and feminist theoretical tools to present foundational and resonant challenges to Jewish Studies: both engage with Jewish identity against its immediate context—Christianity in Boyarin's case and Arab/Muslim culture in the case of Shohat; both associate Zionism, albeit in different ways, with a kind of colonial mimicry, an effort to whiten and westernize the Jew, with destructive psychological effects; and both identify gendered mechanisms of orientalization, demonstrating that the effeminate Jew and the effeminate oriental share the burden of the European gaze. Yet, there is also an important difference between the two: whereas Boyarin is invested in identifying Jewish difference (and therefore an ethical-political Jewish essence),6 Shohat strives to multiply Jewish histories and challenge the paradigms that partition Jews from Arabs, East from West, and modernity from tradition, and in this manner she threatens to dismantle the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish Studies and its coherent object of research.7 This is one possible reason why Shohat and Boyarin's interventions rarely interact in American scholarship. Critical seminars...

On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings by Ella Shohat

Reviewed by: On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings by Ella Shohat Joyce Zonana (bio) On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings Ella Shohat Pluto Press, 2017, xv + 464 pp. ISBN 978-0745399508, $115.00 hardcover; ISBN 978-0745399492, $30.00 paperback. At first glance, renowned cultural critic Ella Shohat's recent collection, spanning thirty years of scholarship and activism, does not appear to be a work of life writing. A visionary contribution to (multi)cultural studies, it ranges across disciplines (history, film, literature, sociology, media), ethnicities (Arab, European, Asian), locations (Israel/Palestine, Iraq, the US, Brazil), and genres (scholarly articles, personal essays, interviews, speeches) to offer helpful new ways of thinking about identity, politics, and culture in the Middle East and beyond. Yet, fundamentally, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements is also a profound work of radical life writing, grounded in an individual life and directly addressing other lives, emerging from and remaining true to the complexities and contradictions of intensely lived experience. "In my writings, I have often felt a survivor's desire to tell again and again about the 'hidden injuries' of translocated class, race, gender, and sexuality" (347), Shohat confesses. Middle East Monitor recognized this aspect of On the Arab-Jew [End Page 455] when it named the book winner of the 2017 Palestine Books Award for Memoir. Shohat herself describes her work as a "kind of portable shrine" to "taboo memories, . . . a monument to my parents and grandparents who have lived in between hostile zones, a fragmented testimony not simply to the raw facts, but also to the labyrinthine intricacies of emotions" (128). Born in Israel/Palestine to displaced Iraqi Jews, Shohat carries within herself the trauma of her family's "ruptured and dislocated history" (78), a consequence of "rival essentialist forms of nationalism" (107). "In many ways I think I lived and internalized my parents' and grandparents' pain," she writes, "to an extent, I believe that my writing about the subject was also a mode of translation: translating their pain into words; giving voice to their sense of loss" (373). Shohat's own experience of living under Zionism was one of "profound and visceral schizophrenia" (66). As a child, she shuttled between her family's privately Arab world and the public world of official Israeli (Jewish) culture, ashamed of Arabic, uncomfortable in Hebrew, and discovering in English "a kind of free zone immune to those painful conflicts of Hebrew and Arabic" (127). Throughout her work, Shohat insists on "reclaiming the part of my identity and history that was denied me: my Arabness" (375). She proudly deploys the term "Arab-Jew," challenging the assumption that it is an oxymoron and inserting the hyphen between "Arab" and "Jew" in order to make the case for "for re-membering a world at once culturally Arab and religiously Jewish" (2). Remembering the links between Arab and Jew also offers a palimpsest and vision for the future, suggesting "potentialities" beyond contemporary "impasses" (375). As she eloquently "translates" her own and her family's experiences, Shohat also moves outward to analyze the political/cultural conditions that generated those experiences. I can think of only two other writers whose cultural/political analyses are so explicitly and productively rooted in their lives: Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, both "organic intellectuals" (157) who inspired and served as models for Shohat, and whom she honors in this collection that traces her own intellectual and personal genealogy. The collection consists of four sections: (1) The Question of the Arab-Jew; (2) Between Palestine and Israel; (3) Cultural Politics of the Middle East; and (4) Muslims, Jews, and Diasporic Readings. In each section Shohat presents exemplars of her prolific work in chronological order, allowing us to trace the evolution of her thought. Readers will find here canonical, groundbreaking essays, such as "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims" and "Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab Jew," along with occasional pieces, including remarks presented in 2001 at New York University, "Reflections on September 11," and a satellite broadcast conversation conducted in 2009 by Rasha Salti and Layla Al-Zubaidi about a showing in Beirut of...

Mizrahi Jews and Holocaust Survivors in 1950s Israeli Cinema: A Revised Outlook

The problematic representation of Mizrahi Jews in Israeli films has been extensively researched over the past few decades. The subject was first thoroughly analyzed in Ella Shohat's comprehensive 1989 study, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. In her book she uses a Marxist approach, claiming that Israeli films express the views of the Ashkenazi hegemony and help preserve its supremacy. Shohat discusses the modes through which an Orientalist dichotomy dominated Eretz-Israeli and Israeli cinema from the outset. In films that portrayed an encounter between Ashkenazi Jews and Mizrahi Jews, the former represented Western values—they were rational, enlightened, and compassion-ate—while Mizrahi Jews were mainly depicted as primitive, inferior, and violent. Over the years, scholars have pointed to other features in the cinematic representation of Ashkenazi-Mizrahi relations in Israeli Bourekas films, which were dominant from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, but Shohat's preliminary observations regarding an Orientalist dichotomy in the 1950s have become generally accepted in Israeli film studies. This article revisits the perceived Orientalist dichotomy through an analysis of 1950s films that focus on encounters between Mizrahi Jews and Holocaust survivors (Ashkenazi Jews) and their integration into Israeli society. These films include Tent City [Ir Ha'ohalim] (Leopold Aryeh Lahola, 1951), Faithful City [Kirya Ne'emana] (Józef Lejtes, 1952), and Hill 24 Doesn't Answer [Givaa 24 Eina Ona] (Thorold Dickinson, 1955). The article claims that in these films Mizrahi Jews are shown as integrating more quickly than Holocaust survivors. Conversely, Holocaust survivors are presented in the films—much like they were in many other cultural realms at that time—as a broken people who ultimately assimilated, albeit with much difficulty.

Palestine…It Is Something Colonial

Palestine…It Is Something Colonial

Palestine…It Is Something Colonial

Palestine…It Is Something Colonial

Edward W. Said and Joseph Boone's The Homoerotics of Orientalism

Edward W. Said and Joseph Boone's The Homoerotics of Orientalism Joseph Massad (bio) Since the passing of Edward W. Said in September 2003, a plethora of books engaging his scholarly and political legacy have cropped up in academe. Ranging from the excellent to the moderately competent, the few that attack Said and his work often belong to that not-so-rare type of monographs whose authors exhibit, or sometimes seem to courageously boast of, their theoretical and empirical illiteracy.1 Attacks on Said and his oeuvre, of course, predate his untimely death; but in this posthumous era, it is a different crowd of academics, ones who had closely guarded their secret criticisms of Said when he was alive but felt compelled to avow them publicly following his demise. Criticizing Said's scholarship and politics or the legacy of both certainly has no statute of limitations; however, it is most interesting that some of the recent attacks on his scholarship and politics issue not only from the traditional American (and Israeli) liberal and conservative right wing (ranging from Michael Walzer and Judith Miller to Bernard Lewis and Emmanuel Sivan), or from apologists for Zionist and Israeli colonialism (ranging again from Michael Walzer and Judith Miller to Bernard Lewis and Emmanuel Sivan), but from left–liberal academics and journalists who want to claim an affiliation with Said as they disavow his work and legacy. Some of them, like the proimperialist parvenu Christopher Hitchens, who made a clean break with their leftist anti-imperial past and embraced the more profitable side of a neoliberal imperial power with abandon, had been friends and allies of Said until (in the case of Hitchens, a few months before) his death—what would their proper designation be, one wonders: nouveaux droitistes, neocons, or quite simply neoliberals? A number of attacks on Said have come from a new corner that is still under construction, one invested in what it calls "sexuality" in [End Page 237] "Islam" (or in the "Middle East," or the "Islamicate" world), from a new discipline that dare speak, indeed shout, its name from the high rooftops of academe, namely, "Queer Middle East studies." But before exploring these Johnny-come-latelies, we must turn to the earlier critics of Said in order to grasp the limited innovativeness and the amount of indebtedness of his more recent critics to them. Said's Orientalist critics had accused him, inter alia, of "demonizing" Orientalists, or indeed the "West" itself (Bernard Lewis, but more recently also Robert Irwin, inter alia), and of ignoring German or Dutch Orientalists (e.g., Maxime Rodinson). While the first claim is baseless given Said's evident attentiveness to the rich multifacetedness of many of the Orientalists he studied, the problem with the second is that neither Rodinson nor his second-rate chorus line ever bothered to demonstrate how Said would have reached different, let alone opposite, conclusions had he subjected the Germans and the Dutch to his critical eye (something he himself had remarked on in responding to his critics in 1985 [Said 1985, 1]), especially as the more recent scholarship of Susanne Marchand has shown that Said would have found very little in the German context that would have altered any of his major findings about French and British Orientalisms (though Marchand, who too often misunderstands Said and Foucault and is hostile to discourse analysis, would argue that Said's view was too totalizing and "binarist" in the German case) (Marchand 2009). In addition to academic Orientalists, Said's right-and left-wing American and Israeli critics describe/d him as "savage," "angry," and "rageful," indeed as a "terrorist," and his left–liberal academic critics (the Israeli Jewish academics among them were, as Ella Shohat has shown, pioneers in this regard), worried about what they deemed to be his "inflexibility," "fixity," "staticness," attachment to "binarisms" and "dichotomous" thinking, lack of "nuance," and inattention to "subtlety." Adopting the most right wing of postcolonial scholars, Homi Bhabha, as their patron saint of choice, these leftists celebrated the latter as "going beyond" Said.2 But as Shohat has painstakingly uncovered, it is the aversion to Said's anticolonialism and Bhabha's ambivalence about it that...

The Specter of the Blackamoor: Figuring Africa and the Orient

The Specter of the BlackamoorFiguring Africa and the Orient Ella Shohat To speak of the Blackamoor figure is to speak of several intertwined imaginaries, especially along the East/West and North/South double geographical axis. A hybrid of the African Black and the Muslim Moor, the Blackamoor figure condenses representations often conceptualized in isolation within the compartmentalized cartographies of the various Area Studies. Scrutiny of the Blackamoor, in this sense, helps shed light on forgotten discursive continuities as well as on historical connectivities across continents and oceans; in this case, those operating along the winding Mediterranean shores of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Manufactured in European workshops, the Blackamoor can on one level be analyzed as part of an ornamental art that reflects various aesthetic tendencies while also reflecting the taste of its producers and consumers. On another level, the Blackamoor can be examined critically, as a stereotypical imaging of the racialized and gendered Black body. Here, however, I will pose a different set of questions: Can the putatively reassuring and domesticated Blackamoor also be viewed as a visual manifestation of an ongoing European anxiety about its "others?" Might this image of Blackamoor docility testify indirectly to a doubly repressed fear toward the neighboring continents of Africa and Asia? Could the apparent civility of the ornamental Blackamoor mask anxieties about racial mixing, cultural syncretism, and intellectual influence? exotica as historical erasure As a cross between the iconographies of "the Black" and "the Moor," this phantasmatic figure acts as a recurrent reminder of the geographical proximity between the shores of Europe and Africa to the South, and Asia to the East, thus evoking the Western trope of "the-barbarians-at-the-gate," whether the gate be that of Vienna, or the straits of Gibraltar, or the Dardanelles. (Centuries after the Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Moors, the new immigrant barbarians from the South clamor at the gates of Fortress Europe.) As polished icons in domestic metropolitan spaces, Blackamoor statues have a fraught relation to Europe's own self-definition, especially in the wake of colonialism and its "civilizing mission." Conceived together [End Page 158] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Acton Collection, XLII.B.1.1-2 © New York University, The Acton Photograph Archive, Villa La Pietra, Florence. within a shared Eurocentric vision, Africa and Asia were often housed under the same academic umbrella within post-Enlightenment Orientalist scholarship—evidenced, for example, in the very institutionalization of the University of London's "School of Oriental and African Studies." The worlds associated with Africa and Asia, meanwhile, had been sharing a long history grounded in trade exchange and cultural traffic. Until the 1869 digging of the Suez Canal—which connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea and to the Indian Ocean, and facilitated the navigation of the maritime route to the "The Jewel in the Crown"—the continents of Africa and Asia had formed part of a geographical continuum. Associated with the grandeur of the Suez Canal-opening era, Giuseppe Verdi's Aïda was first performed at the newly built Khedivial Opera House in Cairo in 1871 as a celebration of progress and the new imperial world order. Inspired by archeological discoveries, Aïda's scenario, written by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, told a story of ancient Egyptians who capture and enslave an Ethiopian princess, Aïda.1 In this instance of the modern staging of the archaic, the Romantic investment in civilizational origins was merged with the triumphant march of science through twinned and parallel forms of digging—the past-oriented diggings of archeology and the future-oriented diggings practiced by engineering. Conducted [End Page 159] by colonial powers, the forward-looking canal project in fact resurrected prior endeavors traced back all the way to antiquity. An historically earlier digging of another "Suez canal," connecting the Nile to the Bitter Lakes and these to the Red Sea, occurred already in seventh century BC on the orders of Pharaoh Necho II and was later completed by Darius I of Persia.2 Egyptologists often saw themselves as rescuing ancient civilization from the neglect of contemporary Egyptians, deemed unaware of the value of antiquity's treasures on...

Culinary Ghosting: A Journey Through a Sweet and Sour Iraq

Ella Shohat tell us about the work of Michael Rakowitz and his three art and culinary projects that comment on the transnational flow of images and sounds, of smells and tactile impressions intermingled with the ashes of war and multiple displacements. Iraqi food and its relation with displacement, return, war, visibility are the subjects of the projects and of Shohat’s analysis. Through the prism of the culinary, Rakowitz’s Iraq cooking projects create an archive of recipes and cultural knowledge in motion. They are also tales of the ghosts of departed communities. The complex Iraqi experience conveyed in bittersweet stories seems to perfectly resonate with the culinary genre hamed-helu, composed of the dissonant harmony between sweet and sour properties. Remembering Iraq through culinary acts transforms the absentees into a palpable presence, through the collective process of dining and dialoguing. Ghosting food thus testifies simultaneously to the disappearance but also to imaginary returns.