New Book: Cohen, Literary Imagination in Israel-Palestine

Cohen, Hella Bloom. The Literary Imagination in Israel-Palestine. Orientalism, Poetry, and Biopolitics, Postcolonialism and Religions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

This book presents a cutting-edge critical analysis of the trope of miscegenation and its biopolitical implications in contemporary Palestinian and Israeli literature, poetry, and discourse. The relationship between nationalism and demographics are examined through the narrative and poetic intrigue of intimacy between Arabs and Jews, drawing from a range of theoretical perspectives, including public sphere theory, orientalism, and critical race studies. Revisiting the controversial Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre, who championed miscegenation in his revisionary history of Brazil, the book deploys a comparative investigation of Palestinian and Israeli writers’ preoccupation with the mixed romance. Author Hella Bloom Cohen offers new interpretations of works by Mahmoud Darwish, A.B. Yehoshua, Orly Castel-Bloom, Nathalie Handal, and Rula Jebreal, among others.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction to Israeli-Palestinian Literature and Postcolonial Studies: An Uneasy Relationship
• 2. Reading Freyre in the Holy Land
• 3. “The Synthetic Principle”: Darwish’s “Rita”
• 4. “Intimate Histories”: Internal Miscegenation in A. B. Yehoshua’s A Late Divorce
• 5. “Mixed Syndicate”: Poetics of Fabric under Occupation
• 6. Reading past Freyre: Disembodied Miscegenation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

 

HELLA BLOOM COHEN is an assistant professor of English at St. Catherine University, USA. She previously held a visiting assistant professorship at Elon University, and has published on material culture and global literature.

 

 

 

ToC: Israel Studies 21.1 (2016; Narratives of the 1948 war)

Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2016

Table of Contents

Representations of Israeli-Jewish — Israeli-Palestinian Memory and Historical Narratives of the 1948 War

Edited by Avraham Sela and Alon Kadish

Preface and Acknowledgements

pp. V-VI

Israeli and Palestinian Memories and Historical Narratives of the 1948 War—An Overview

pp. 1-25
Avraham Sela, Avraham Kadish

 

The 1948 Palestine War on the Small Screen: A Comparative Analysis of its Representation in Two Israeli Television Series

pp. 27-53
Bosmat Garami

 

Israel’s Publications Agency and the 1948 Palestinian Refugees

pp. 54-81
Rafi Nets-Zehngut

 

The War of Independence Exhibited: A Study of Three Israeli Museums

pp. 82-108
Offer Boord

 

Contested Urban Memoryscape Strategies and Tactics in Post-1948 Haifa

pp. 109-131
Ziva Kolodney

 

The Making of a Myth: The Story of Kfar Etzion in Religious Zionism 1948–1967

pp. 132-156
Dror Greenblum

 

Descending the Khazooq: “Working Through” the Trauma of the Nakba in Emile Habibi’s Oeuvre

pp. 157-182
Assaf Peled

 

Wa-ma Nasayna (We Have Not Forgotten): Palestinian Collective Memory and the Print Work of Abed Abdi

pp. 183-208
Tal Ben-Zvi

 

New Article: Sazzad, Mahmoud Darwish’s Poetry as Sumud

Sazzad, Rehnuma. “Mahmoud Darwish’s Poetry as Sumud. Palestinian Resistance to Israeli Occupation and Subjugation.” Interventions (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2015.1079493

 

Abstract

This essay makes explicit the connection between Palestinian resistance to Israeli control and the principle of sumud. Drawing on Raja Shehadeh and Ismail Shammout, I define this concept and show its strategic role in the resistance. Arguably, critics have identified Darwish’s constant pursuit of aesthetics and his deep commitment to the Palestinian cause without linking them to the narrative of sumud. I suggest that his contribution to the narrative is built on the ground that his aggressors lack the intrinsic tie to the land, which his people perennially possess. Whereas the Israelis produce mythical claims on the land, the indigenous Palestinians are like their olive trees – unswervingly there. In particular, the creativity of the people makes present their absented homeland. Darwish’s exile renders the second phenomenon more comprehensible. Even though he was physically removed from his homeland at a young age, his imagination remained implanted there throughout his life, which resulted in a rich oeuvre.

 

 

New Book: Hochberg, Visual Occupations

 

Hochberg, Gil Z. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, Perverse Modernities. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015.

 

 

In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists’ creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists’ exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel’s militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.

Gil Z. Hochberg is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at UCLA. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination.

 

Table of Contents

 

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction. Visual Politics at a Conflict Zone  1

Part I. Concealment  

1. Visible Invisibility: On Ruins, Erasure, and Haunting  37

2. From Invisible Spectators to the Spectacle of Terror: Chronicles of a Contested Citizenship  57

Part II. Surveillance  

3. The (Soldier’s) Gaze and the (Palestinian) Body: Power, Fantasy, and Desire in the Militarized Contact Zone  79

4. Visual Rights and the Prospect of Exchange: The Photographic Event Placed under Duress  97

Part III. Witnessing

5. “Nothing to Look At”; or, “For Whom Are You Shooting?”: The Imperative to Witness and the Menace of the Global Gaze  115

6. Shooting War: On Witnessing One’s Failure to See (on Time)  139

 

Closing Words  163

Notes  167

Bibliography  187

Index  207

New Article: Harris, Language and Identity in Sikseck and Kashua

Harris, Rachel S. “Hebraizing the Arab-Israeli: Language and Identity in Ayman Sikseck’s To Jaffa and Sayed Kashua’s Second Person Singular.” Journal of Jewish Identities 7.2 (2014): 35-58.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v007/7.2.harris.html

 

Excerpt

Hebrew unified Jews from disparate countries and ethnic backgrounds as part of Israel’s nation-building process; consequently, linguistic mastery of the Jewish language served as the sine qua non of social mobility. Arab citizens living within the new state were caught in this wide net; knowing Hebrew and becoming familiar with secular Jewish Israeli culture was a precondition for advancement and integration. In time, Arab writers, such as Emile Habiby, would write in Hebrew, which like Jewish writers in Israel who continued to write in their mother-tongue Arabic, confronts what Lital Levy has described as the conventional binaries of Israel: “Hebrew Arabic, Arab and Jew.” By disrupting these traditional dichotomies, writers “engage translation inside their texts as a creative alternative to barking, as a mode of resistance to the authority that has displaced them from their pasts and their homes.” This binary division has traditionally assumed that Arab means Palestinian, and is separate from Israeli, which implies Jewish; but two young writers, the prolific and widely known Sayed Kashua, and the first-time novelist Ayman Sikseck, offer a new hybrid identity in which the Arab-Israeli (non-Jewish Arab citizens of Israel) casts off the polar division the two options represent, and instead these writers present a third path. Rejecting the isolated position of the Arab within Israel, and arguing his increasing assimilation in the twenty-first century through mastery of language, integration within the education system, changing social values and economic status, as well as a radical reformulation of political values, the hybrid identity offers ways in which a generation of Arabs coming of age within Israel have staked out a cultural and intellectual space that confounds previous categorizations.

The history of Arab writers using Hebrew has been viewed within a framework of post-colonial criticism in which writing in Hebrew is deemed an act of protest. Arab-Israeli writers are considered to produce minor literature: literature by a minority in the language of a majority. This position assumes, as Hanan Hever has shown in his study of Anton Shammas’s novel Arabesques, that Arab-Israeli authors de-familiarize and de-territorialize Hebrew by separating it from its Jewish identity while simultaneously opening up space within Hebrew for the Arab-Israeli.Writers such as Shammas and Habiby satisfy the criteria of writing minor literature that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari consider an act of dissent by the colonised protesting against established hierarchies of power. Arab-Israeli writers, moving between Hebrew and Arabic in poetry, prose, political writing, and journalism have established Hebrew as a space of “otherness,” creating a distance in representations of self. In an Israeli context, Hever has argued that Arab minor literature, in Hebrew, “invades and subverts the majority culture,” whereby Arab writers, as Lawrence Silberstein elucidates, “problematize and subvert the dominant Zionist/Israeli conception of Hebrew literature as Jewish literature and Israeli culture as Jewish culture.”

 

New Article: Maher, Journeys into the Western Galilee, in Khouri and Yehoshua

Maher, John. “Blue, Half-Forgotten Hills: Journeys into the Western Galilee, in Ilyas Khouri’s Gate of the Sun and A.B. Yehoshua’s The Liberated Bride.” Comparative Critical Studies 10, supplement (2013): 107-121.

URL: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/ccs.2013.0116

Excerpt

At the end of the day, Rivlin will come no closer to finding the so-called ‘secret’ of the Algerian civil war than he will to finding the ‘secret’ of his son’s failed marriage, a tale, literally and metaphorically, of subterranean incest which mirrors his own ignorance of the lives of the minority in Haifa and Acre and Jerusalem and the Galilee. As with Naim, the young Palestinian boy in The Lover, the servant always know more about the master than the master knows about the servant.