Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices

Shohat Ella Shohat

Description

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.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Middle East

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 17 juillet 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822387961
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices

NEXT WAVE New Directions in Women’s Studies A series edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan,

and Robyn Wiegman

Ella Shohat TABOO MEMORIES, DIASPORIC VOICES

Duke University Press Durham and London 2006

∫2006 Ella Shohat

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$

Designed by C.H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Scala with Univers display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

appear on the last printed page of this book.

Acknowledgments for previously printed material and credits for

illustrations appear at the end of this book.

para Rober t,‘yuni

Illustrations

Preface

xiii

ix

Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge:

Area Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies

Gender and the Culture of Empire:

Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema

17

Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies of Adaptation

The Cinema after Babel:

Language, Di√erence, Power (with Robert Stam)

‘‘Lasers for Ladies’’:

Endo Discourse and the Inscriptions of Science

106

139

Disorienting Cleopatra: A Modern Trope of Identity

Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions:

Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews

Notes on the ‘‘Post-Colonial’’

233

201

Post-Fanon and the Colonial: A Situational Diagnosis

Post–Third Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema

Rupture and Return:

290

Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews

The ‘‘Postcolonial’’ in Translation:

330

Reading Edward Said between English and Hebrew

Index

385

1

70

166

250

359

CONTENTS

1 The Promethean masternarrative:Adventures of Robinson Crusoe20 2 20Between virginity and cannibalism: ‘‘America’’ 3 22Counternarrative to ‘‘discovery discourse’’ 4 The pornographic intertext of travel literature: Babylon inIntolerance23 5 Terra Incognita or the power to name: A map of America 28 6 Map as a document of possession:King Solomon’s Mines28 7 Global ubiquity:Around the World in 80 Days30 8 Penetrating the ‘‘last frontier’’:A Trip to the Moon30 9 34The West rescues the Egyptian past from oblivion 10 Amplifying the voices on the margins of Egyptology: Al-Mumia37 11 Sheltered in the tropics: Gender and ambivalence 40 12 National (white) fantasies fromThe Birth of a Nation44 13 The imperial path to the couple:Road to Morocco45 14 Fertility goddess: Carmen Miranda inThe Gang’s All Here48 15 Erotic animalization: Josephine Baker inZou Zou48 16 Entering the inaccessible harem:Harum Scarum52 17 The interracial homoerotic subtext:Lawrence of Arabia58 18 The desert as the site of the sexual imaginary: The Sheik58 19 Gender transgressions in the Oriental desert: Brooke Shields,Sahara59 20 Imitating mimesis in Istanbul:National Geographic magazine 81 21 Breaking the Ten Commandments:History of the World, Part I85 22 The Prophet Muhammad’s disembodied gaze: The Message90 23 Casting a black God: ‘‘De Lawd’’ inThe Green Pastures93

ILLUSTRATIONS