*Winner of the MEMO Palestine Book Awards 2017*

Spanning several decades, Ella Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East, focusing on the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew. This book gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material.

Defying the binarist and Eurocentric Arab-versus-Jew rendering of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Shohat's work has dared to engage with the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism and nationalism. Shohat's paradigm-shifting work unpacks such fraught issues as the anomalies of the national/colonial in Zionist discourse; the narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; the links and distinctions between the dispossession of the Nakba and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; the traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; the echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of 'the Jew'; and the efforts to imagine a possible future inter-communal 'convivencia'.

Shohat's transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author's intellectual journey.

About the Author
Ella Shohat is a ground-breaking cultural critic, contributing to changing the discourse on colonialism, feminism and representations of the Middle East. Teaching Cultural Studies and of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, her writing unsettles the boundaries between the 'West and the Rest'. Among her many books are Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Duke University Press, 2006), Israeli Cinema (IB Tauris, 2010) and her collected writings On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto, 2017).

Reviews

'A scholar of unique range, learning, and originality'

-- Jacqueline Rose, author of The Last Resistance (Verso, 2007)

'Authoritative, knowledgeable, and fascinating ... an essential addition to understanding the nature of Israel and the conflict its establishment has created, not just for Palestinians but also for the Mizrahi or 'Arab Jews'. Poignant and thought-provoking'

-- Ghada Karmi, author of Return: A Palestinian Memoir (Verso, 2015)

'In this rich and wide-ranging collection, Ella Shohat demonstrates subtlety, imagination, and the potential of engaged writing. Although it probes many aspects of loss and dislocation, this work is sustained, in the end, by a profound sense of hope'

-- Ahdaf Soueif, author of Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed (Bloomsbury, 2014)

'Ella Shohat is a gifted cultural critic who writes about complex issues with great clarity, wisdom, and insight. In this collection of essays she tackles a wide range of Middle Eastern topics from a refreshingly original and radical perspective. She is a wrecking-ball of Zionist orthodoxies'

-- Avi Shlaim, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

'The volume is so rich in content and perspective on the changing patterns of ethnicity and its interaction with historical circumstance that I hardly know where to begin ... A genuine and enduring achievement.'

-- Peace News

'[A] profoundly important collection ... of enormous importance in understanding not only the tragedy of the post-1947 "population exchange" but the ethnic conflicts tearing apart the Middle East and North Africa today'

-- Counterpunch


Awards
Winner of Palestine Book Awards 2017 (UK).



Book Information
ISBN 9780745399492
Author Ella Shohat
Format Paperback
Page Count 480
Imprint Pluto Press
Publisher Pluto Press
Weight(grams) 740g