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  • Book cover of Unthinking Eurocentrism

    The authors correct eurocentric criticism from media studies in the past by examining Hollywood movie genres such as the western and the musical from a multicultural perspective.

  • Book cover of On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements
    Ella Shohat

     · 2017

    The Selected Works of Ella Shohat, renowned writer on the Middle-East and critic of Zionism.

  • Book cover of Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices
    Ella Shohat

     · 2006

    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.

  • Book cover of Israeli Cinema
    Ella Shohat

     · 2010

    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.

  • Book cover of Race in Translation

    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.

  • Book cover of Talking Visions
    Ella Shohat

     · 2001

    This multivoiced collection of essays and images presents a "relational" feminism of diverse communities, affiliations, and practices.

  • Book cover of Flagging Patriotism

    The question "Why do they hate us?" is one of the most oft-cited puzzles of contemporary American affairs, yet it’s not clear to whom "they" or "us" refers, nor even what "hate" means. In this bold new work, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam take apart the "hate discourse" of right-wing politics, placing it in an international context. How, for example, do other nations love themselves, and how is that love connected to their attitudes toward America? Is love of country "monogamous" or can one love many countries? When can a country’s self-love be a symptom of self-hatred? Drawing upon their extensive experience with South American, European, and Middle Eastern societies, the authors have written a long engagement with a problem that refuses to go away. Flagging Patriotism considers these complex features of "being patriotic," and in so doing insists that the idea of patriotism, instead of being rejected or embraced, be accorded the complex identity it possesses.

  • Book cover of Late Imperial Culture

    Spanning time and space from late Victorian Britain and Ireland to postwar America and Latin America, Late Imperial Culture maps crucial regions in the terrain of imperial cultural practices including theater, film, photography, fiction, autobiography, and body art. The forms reviewed in this lively collection range from those which accept and reproduce empire's dominant self-images to scathing critiques of the oppressions that colonialism has visited upon its subjects and the price it continues to exact from them. A diverse range of theoretically sophisticated and historically informed contributors take as given two fundamental facts about the culture of imperialism: firstly, that it has a long and complex history which, in the present epoch, merits its being designated "late"; and, secondly, that its impact on the contemporary world is far from exhausted. Together they highlight the contradictions in the serried cultural practices of imperialism in its different historical periods. Contributors: Aijaz Ahmad, Steven Cagan, Romn de la Campa, David Glover, May Joseph, Caren Kaplan, Rob Nixon, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, and Marianna Torgovnick.

  • Book cover of Dreams of a Nation
    Hamid Dabashi

     · 2020

    Over the last quarter-century, Palestinian cinema has emerged as a major artistic force on the global scene. Deeply rooted in the historic struggles for national self-determination, this cinema is the single most important artistic expression of a much-maligned people. In Dreams of a Nation, filmmakers, critics and scholars discuss the extraordinary social and artistic significance of Palestinian film. It is the only volume of its kind in any language.

  • Book cover of Generations of Dissent

    Situated in the fields of contemporary literary and cultural studies, the ten essays collected in Generations of Dissent shed light on the artistic creativity, cultural production, intellectual movements, and acts of political dissidence across the Middle East and North Africa. Born of the contributors’ research on dissidence and state co-option in a variety of artistic and creative fields, the volume’s core themes reflect the notion that the recent Arab uprisings did not appear in a cultural, political, or historical vacuum. Rather than focus on how protestors “finally” broke the walls of fear created by authoritarian regimes in the region, these essays show that the uprisings were rooted in multiple generations and various acts of resistance decades prior to 2010–11. Firat and Taleghani’s volume maps the complicated trajectories of artistic and creative dissent across time and space, showing how artists have challenged institutions and governments over the past six decades.