A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America

by Keith P. Feldman

Winner, Best Book in Humanities and Cultural Studies (Literary Studies), Association for Asian American Studies

Upon signing the first U.S. arms agreement with Israel in 1962, John F. Kennedy assured Golda Meir that the United States had “a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East,” comparable only to that of the United States with Britain. After more than five decades such a statement might seem incontrovertible—and yet its meaning has been fiercely contested from the start.  A Shadow over Palestine brings a new, deeply informed, and transnational perspective to the decades and the cultural forces that have shaped sharply differing ideas of Israel’s standing with the United States—right up to the violent divisions of today. Focusing on the period from 1960 to 1985, author Keith P. Feldman reveals the centrality of Israel and Palestine in postwar U.S. imperial culture. Some representations of the region were used to manufacture “commonsense” racial ideologies underwriting the conviction that liberal democracy must coexist with racialized conditions of segregation, border policing, poverty, and the repression of dissent. Others animated vital critiques of these conditions, often forging robust if historically obscured border-crossing alternatives.  In this rich cultural history of the period, Feldman deftly analyzes how artists, intellectuals, and organizations—from the United Nations, the Black Panther Party, and the Association of Arab American University Graduates to James Baldwin, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Edward Said, and June Jordan—linked the unfulfilled promise of liberal democracy in the United States with the perpetuation of settler democracy in Israel and the possibility of Palestine’s decolonization. In one of his last essays, published in 2003, Edward Said wrote, “In America, Palestine and Israel are regarded as local, not foreign policy, matters.” A Shadow over Palestine maps this jagged terrain on which this came to be, amid a wealth of robust alternatives, and the undeterred violence at home and abroad unleashed as a result of this special relationship. 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Cultural Studies

312 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 2015

Reviews

[readee · Rating 4 out of 5]

reading through the chp titles, I was really excited for this book. after finishing, I feel slightly underwhelmed. I thought the literary analysis in chps 1 and 2 felt more like summary than argument.
the book would’ve benefited from Feldman providing what he sees as characteristics of Cold War liberalism and racial liberalism (+ then how those frameworks defined freedom, agency, national identity, subjecthood, etc.) and then from there better communicate how debates over Israel and Palestine either undermined or underscored those lib racial imaginaries.

with that being said, Feldman does cover a lot of ground here, so there’s a little something for everyone. the intro and conclusion read like parodies of academic text w how much jargon Feldman uses, but the chps themselves are a lot more manageable.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many 50 cent words I'm surprised Curtis Jackson wasn't a coauthor... Some real great source material in here, real gems on occasion, but you have to filter through the dense, opaque, esoteric language to do anything with it.

[Daphne · Rating 5 out of 5]

i picked this up because of its engagement with June Jordan and the Black Feminist 80s but every chapter was a banger. Every chapter could honestly be expanded into a full book on its own but taken together it’s an excellent overview of 1960-1985 domestic US discourses around Zionism

[Mills College Library]

327.73056 F3125 2015