Description
Combining vivid ethnographic detail, postcolonial theory, and readings of Israeli and Palestinian popular texts, Stein considers a broad range of Israeli leisure cultures of the Oslo period with a focus on the Jewish desires for Arab things, landscapes, and people that regional diplomacy catalyzed. Moving beyond conventional accounts, she situates tourism within a broader field of "discrepant mobility," foregrounding the relationship between histories of mobility and immobility, leisure and exile, consumption and militarism. She contends that the study of Israeli tourism must open into broader interrogations of the Israeli occupation, the history of Palestinian dispossession, and Israel's future in the Arab Middle East. Itineraries in Conflict is both a cultural history of the Oslo process and a call to fellow scholars to rethink the contours of the Arab-Israeli conflict by considering the politics of popular culture in everyday Israeli and Palestinian lives.
An anthropological study of the relationship of tourism to Israeli identities, politics, and nation-making
About the Author
Rebecca L. Stein is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at Duke University. She is a co-editor of Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews
"Itineraries in Conflict is a subtly devastating book. Deftly weaving Jewish Israeli tourist practices into the wake of the Oslo Process, Rebecca L. Stein demonstrates how political orders sediment into personal tastes, social identities, and regional desires. By showing how drinking coffee might be an act of peace or a theater of war, this book marks an ambitious new itinerary for the study of consumption, tourism, and nationalism."-Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality
"A remarkable ethnography. In this lyrical study, Rebecca L. Stein dissects the histories, economic realities, and state practices underlying Israeli tourism into Palestinian areas. She evokes the political longings that animate such tourism while never forgetting the dense histories of power that structure its logics. Impressive in its originality, Stein's riveting challenge to simplistic assumptions about Israeli and Palestinian politics is ultimately an incitement to hope."-Melani McAlister, author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000
"An enormously important book. While Rebecca L. Stein's work contributes to a growing literature on the technologies and discourses of Zionist domination, both historical and contemporary, it stands out for its brilliant and subtle account of the post-Oslo construction of the Israeli Jewish 'desire for the Arab.' Her analysis of the making of Palestinian people, spaces, and activities into sites of Jewish tourism is careful, compelling, and disturbing."-Wendy Brown, author of Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire
Book Information
ISBN 9780822342731
Author Rebecca L. Stein
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 336g