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

by Ella Shohat

Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat’s work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat’s work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time.
 
As a renowned academic, orator, and activist, Shohat’s work unpacks complexly fraught issues: anomalies of the national and colonial in Zionist discourse; narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; links and distinctions between the expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 war and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew; and efforts to imagine a possible united and peaceful future. Shohat’s trans-disciplinary perspective illuminates the contemporary cultural politics in and around the Middle East. A transdisciplinary work engaging history, literature, sociology, film, media, and cultural studies, Selected Writings offers a vivid sense of Shohat’s unique intellectual journey and field-defining career. 
 

Genres: Nonfiction, Middle East, Politics, History, Jewish, Judaism, Religion

480 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2017

About the author

Ella Habiba Shohat (Arabic: إيلا حبيبة شوحط; born 1959) is Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University, and has taught, lectured and written extensively on issues having to do with Eurocentrism and Orientalism, as well as with postcolonial and transnational approaches to Cultural Studies. More specifically, since the 1980s she has developed critical approaches to the study of Arab Jews/Mizrahim in the context of Israel and Palestine. Born to a Baghdadi family, Ella Habiba Shohat defines herself as an Arab Jew.

Her writing has been translated into several languages, including: Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, and Italian. Shohat has also served on the editorial board of several journals, including: Social Text; Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She is a recipient of such fellowships as Rockefeller and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where she also taught at the School of Criticism and Theory. Recently she was awarded a Fulbright research / lectureship at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, for working on the cultural intersections between the Middle East and Latin America.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Ibrahim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading bits and piece of this pseudo-memoir for the past 2 months - I finally finished the book a few minutes ago. I'm disappointed to say the least. Not in the book, just in how absolutely fucked up things are. I'm also saddened by how Habiba Shoat's never-ending references to the past (and surreptitiously to her own vision of the future) have ended. This book isn't exceptionally long, but each chapter had some sort of picture (and a picture is a thousand words, I guess?).

Anyways, fuck Israel, fuck Arab traitors, fuck capitalism, fuck colonizers, and fuck white people. The rich multicultural mosaic that is the "Middle East" (a richness in coexistence and history that Western Europe could only dream of) has been raped by the centers of global capital. Arab Jews (the focus of this book) have been central to the development of Arabic music and Arabic food - their exile from their indigenous lands into the settler-colony of "Israel" has left a lacuna in the Arab world that may never be filled.

If you're not really familiar with Ella Shohat's work, reading the first and last chapter of this book would be ideal. If you're an Ella Shohat stan (like me), every inch of this book is worth reading.

I can't say much else since this kind of broods into very diverse topics (that's why I'd prefer to call this a memoir). Ella Shohat is based.

[Lauan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've only read one essay so far from this collection of works by Ella Shohat - "The Invention of the Mizrahim - but this alone deserves 5 stars.

[Julian Pritchard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Career-spanning collection of Shohat’s work. She has a unique perspective on mizrahim and the relation of Jews and Arabs. While this is likely to be controversial for many Jews and Arabs, it raises a lot of interesting questions. These essays discuss food, language, politics, film, Fanon, Said, US empire/globalization, and other topics.

[Michael McIntyre · Rating 3 out of 5]

The lead essay is great, but too much of this book is filler material.