New Article: Alon-Mozes, National Parks for a Multicultural Society

Alon-Mozes, Tal. “National Parks for a Multicultural Society: Planning Israel’s Past and Present National Parks.” In Landscape Culture – Culturing Landscapes: The Differentiated Construction of Landscapes (ed. Diedrich Burns et al; Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015): 173-83.

 

 

Extract

Both case studies demonstrate the power of the landscape as an agent fostering first national and later communal identity. Early planning of Gan HaShlosha and Zippori national parks emphasized the role of the biblical/Hellenistic pastoral landscape in reinforcing a common national identity among the Jewish settlers of Israel. Consequently, the Palestinians’ past was erased from Zippori grounds, as in other places in Israel, and their narrative was silenced.

Due to the failure of the melting pot policy and the emergence of Israel as a multicultural society, contemporary Israeli national parks are designed and managed in order to address the needs of various communities of visitors, and not solely the hegemonic ones. The new clientele includes veteran Jews and new immigrants, various Jewish ethnic groups, ultra-orthodox Jews, Christian pilgrims, and the Palestinians Currently, panning strives to increase the profitability of the parks by recruiting new communities, by enabling mass gatherings and communal cultural events, and by mitigating conflicts among participants. Various stakeholders promote parallel narratives within and surrounding the parks, advancing the parcelization of the area based on time or space zones. Within this relatively enabling system, even the Palestinian narrative of Zippori is marked on the land, in spite of objections based on nationalistic considerations.

 

 

New Article: Aronoff & Aronoff, Spatial Narratives of Border Crossings between Israel, Jordan and Egypt

Aronoff, Eric and Yael Aronoff. “Bordering on Peace: Spatial Narratives of Border Crossings between Israel, Jordan and Egypt.” In The Design of Frontier Spaces. Control and Ambiguity (ed. Carolyn Loeb and Andreas Luescher; Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 129-55.

Excerpt

These questions about border narratives are the focus of this essay. Examining the border crossings between Israel and the two neighboring states with which it has open borders, Jordan and Egypt, we analyze the narratives created in these spaces through

the arrangement of space, iconography, and signage, as well as the legal elements that also regulate the flow of persons across the borders. These sites, in effect, constitute the first encounter of travelers with the new state about to be entered; as such, these spatial, visual and legal elements combine to create a “story” being told to that traveler (even if that traveler is a member of that community who is returning). That story may be intentional, the result of a conscious effort or policy on the part of the state, or unintentional as the ad hoc reflection of attitudes and ideas expressing themselves through the choices made “on the ground” by border personnel. That story is both about who “they” – the imagined community whose territory the traveler is about to enter – are and what they represent; it also simultaneously is about who “you,” the traveler, might be – why you might be there, the relationship imagined between “they” and “you.” Like a text, these spaces construct both their ideal “author” and their ideal “reader.”

In this way, like many of the chapters in this volume, our approach extends but also differs from much of the scholarship that makes up the recent resurgence of border studies. As many scholars have pointed out, rising attention across multiple disciplines to issues of globalism and transnationalism, as well as cultural studies approaches to concepts heretofore in the domain of social science, have resulted in increased interest in borders (Newman, 2011). Until relatively recently, borders have been approached within the fields of international relations or geography as static, empirical entities, largely in the context of examining relations between states (Sack, 1986; Taylor, 1994; Shapiro and Alker, 1996). More recent theories emanating from anthropology and cultural studies have emphasized the social construction of boundaries as processes for defining personal, group and national identities, through processes of inclusion and exclusion, defining the “self” and the “Other.” These approaches have broadened the concept of “borders” to include not only the actual borderline between states, but many other kinds of borders. In this conception, borders are everywhere, and the “border narratives” that constitute them are made up of multiple discourses and texts: newspapers, political speeches, posters, poems, plays, novels, everyday speech that give meaning to the border as the “construction of institutionalized forms of ‘we’ and the ‘other’ which are produced and perpetually reproduced in education texts, narratives and discourses” (Newman and Paasi, 1998, p. 196).

New Article: Tsapovsky and Frosh, Television Audiences and Transnational Nostalgia: Mad Men in Israel

Tsapovsky, Flora and Paul Frosh, “Television Audiences and Transnational Nostalgia: Mad Men in Israel.” Media, Culture & Society 37.5 (2015): 784-99.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443715587872

 

Abstract

Nostalgia is a transnational condition. It not only describes temporal displacement from a vanished past but also spatial dislocation from a lost dwelling place: home. What happens, then, when the spatio-temporal dimensions of nostalgia are realigned by media globalization? Can the transnational consumption of media texts create memory-structures that allow viewers to feel ‘at home’ in a past that is not ‘theirs’? What might such a reconstitution of nostalgia tell us about practices of interpretation, recollection, and identification among media audiences? Addressing these questions, this article investigates the responses of Israeli television viewers to a purportedly nostalgic US drama series, Mad Men. In the process, it reemphasizes nostalgia’s spatial axis, while reframing nostalgia as a construct of viewer engagement rather than as a feature of media texts. Ultimately, it proposes that contemporary transnational nostalgia possesses a double structure: it is selective, acting as an emotional and cognitive resource consciously used by audiences to examine their present personal and socio-political realities; that very use, however, depends on a ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ in which the mediated pasts of distant societies are seamlessly experienced as a part of viewers’ proximate lifeworlds.