Pluto Press On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings of Ella Shohat

Spanning several decades, Ella Shohat s work has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East, focusing on the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew. This book gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs. as well as previously unpublished material. Defying the binarist and Eurocentric Arab-versus-Jew rendering of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Shohat s work has dared to engage with the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism and nationalism. Shohat s paradigm-shifting work unpacks such fraught issues as the anomalies of the national/colonial in Zionist discourse; the narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; the links and distinctions between the dispossession of the Nakba and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; the traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; the echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew ; and the efforts to imagine a possible future inter-communal convivencia . Shohat s transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author s intellectual journey. Review A scholar of unique range, learning, and originality... Shohat has an enormous international reputation and more or less founded her field which now flourishes in response to her own scholarship. --Jacqueline Rose Authoritative, knowledgeable, and fascinating... an essential addition to understanding the nature of Israel and the conflict its establishment has created, not just for Palestinians but also for the Mizrahi or 'Arab Jews'. Poignant and thought-provoking. --Ghada Karmi, author of Return: A Palestinian Memoir (Verso, 2015) In this rich and wide-ranging collection, Ella Shohat demonstrates subtlety, imagination, and the potential of engaged writing. Although it probes many aspects of loss and dislocation, this work is sustained, in the end, by a profound sense of hope. --Ahdaf Soueif, author of Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed(Bloomsbury, 2014) About the Author Ella Shohat, an Arab Jew from a Baghdadi family now living in New York, is Professor of Cultural Studies and of Middle Eastern Studies, New York University. Among her many books are Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (I.B. Tauris, 2010) and Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Duke University Press, 2006).