Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity challenges conventional understandings of identity based on notions of nation and culture as bounded or discrete. Through careful examinations of various transnational, hybrid, border, and diasporic forces and practices, these essays push at the edge of cultural studies, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory and raise crucial questions about ethnographic methodology.
This volume exemplifies a cross-disciplinary cultural studies and a concept of culture rooted in lived experience as well as textual readings. Anthropologists and scholars from related fields deploy a range of methodologies and styles of writing to blur and complicate conventional dualisms between authors and subjects of research, home and away, center and periphery, and first and third world. Essays discuss topics such as Rai, a North African pop music viewed as westernized in Algeria and as Arab music in France; the place of Sephardic and Palestinian writers within Israel's Ashkenazic-dominated arts community; and the use and misuse of the concept "postcolonial" as it is applied in various regional contexts.
In exploring histories of displacement and geographies of identity, these essays call for the reconceptualization of theoretical binarisms such as modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars and students concerned with postmodern and postcolonial theory, ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Contributors. Norma Alarcon, Edward M. Bruner, Nahum D. Chandler, Ruth Frankenberg, Joan Gross, Dorinne Kondo, Kristin Koptiuch, Smadar Lavie, Lata Mani, David McMurray, Kirin Narayan, Greg Sarris, Ted Swedenburg

About the Author

Smadar Lavie is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Critical Theory at the University of California at Davis.

Ted Swedenburg is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo.

Reviews
"Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity is informed not only by detailed attention to specific case studies or theoretical analyses, but also by an awareness of theoretical work in several fields which allows the highlighting of points and circuits of connections across disciplines and areas. This collection succeeds in ways which are thought provoking and likely to lead to vital discussions across disciplines."- David Lloyd, University of California, Berkeley
"For me the strength of this collection lies in its various attempts to experiment in proseform and to thus exemplify in practice the boldness of theory required by this awesome and treacherous field. It therewith helps us all in furthering the bustling heterogeneity of displacing-disciplinarity minimally demanded by its momentous subjects and subject-matters."-Michael Taussig, Columbia University



Book Information
ISBN 9780822317203
Author Smadar Lavie
Format Paperback
Page Count 344
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 576g