- New York, New York, United States
Ella Shohat
New York University, Middle East and Islamic Studies, Faculty Member
- New York University, Arts and Public Policy, Faculty Memberadd
- noneedit
Honorable Mention in the Non-Fiction category for the 2014 Arab American Book Award, The Arab American Museum.
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Katherine Kovacs Singer Best Book Award for 1994.
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This essay questions the axiomatic ontology of the “Judeo-Arabic language” as a cohesive unit separate from Arabic and its entanglement in the persistent ambivalence surrounding the conjoining of “the Jewish” and “the Arab.” In the wake... more
This essay questions the axiomatic ontology of the
“Judeo-Arabic language” as a cohesive unit separate from Arabic and
its entanglement in the persistent ambivalence surrounding the conjoining
of “the Jewish” and “the Arab.” In the wake of the partition of
Palestine and the dislocation of Arab-Jews to Israel, classificatory categories, which can be traced to the nineteenth-century academic meeting
ground of Semitic/Oriental and Hebraic/Judaic studies, came to be
reinforced in the twentieth century within Zionist discourse. Largely
shaped by foundational scholars of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
knowledge production about Arabic-speaking Jews was embedded
in what the essay regards as “Judeo-Arabic Orientalism.” Entrenched
in the politics of linguistic naming is a partitioning ethnonationalist
imaginary of culture and belonging. The epistemic framework undergirding
“Judeo-Arabic language” is emblematic of what the essay refers
to as “the separationist thesis.” Revisiting a few key arguments, the
essay traces the genealogy not of a language but rather of an idea of a
language, highlighting the invention of a paradoxical formation—an
Arabic that is at once non-Arabic.
KEYWORDS: Judeo-Arabic language; the separationist thesis; Judeo-
Arabic Orientalism; hyphen in Arab-Jew; hyphen in Judeo-Arabic;
disavowal of Arabic; partitioning imaginary; indigenous naming;
de-Arabization
“Judeo-Arabic language” as a cohesive unit separate from Arabic and
its entanglement in the persistent ambivalence surrounding the conjoining
of “the Jewish” and “the Arab.” In the wake of the partition of
Palestine and the dislocation of Arab-Jews to Israel, classificatory categories, which can be traced to the nineteenth-century academic meeting
ground of Semitic/Oriental and Hebraic/Judaic studies, came to be
reinforced in the twentieth century within Zionist discourse. Largely
shaped by foundational scholars of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
knowledge production about Arabic-speaking Jews was embedded
in what the essay regards as “Judeo-Arabic Orientalism.” Entrenched
in the politics of linguistic naming is a partitioning ethnonationalist
imaginary of culture and belonging. The epistemic framework undergirding
“Judeo-Arabic language” is emblematic of what the essay refers
to as “the separationist thesis.” Revisiting a few key arguments, the
essay traces the genealogy not of a language but rather of an idea of a
language, highlighting the invention of a paradoxical formation—an
Arabic that is at once non-Arabic.
KEYWORDS: Judeo-Arabic language; the separationist thesis; Judeo-
Arabic Orientalism; hyphen in Arab-Jew; hyphen in Judeo-Arabic;
disavowal of Arabic; partitioning imaginary; indigenous naming;
de-Arabization
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“Remainders Revisited: An Exilic Journey from Hakham Sasson Khdhuri to Joseph Sassoon Semah” in On Friendship/(Collateral Damage) III-The third GaLUT: Baghdad, Jerusalem, Amsterdam, Joseph Sassoon Semah & Linda Bouws eds., Amsterdam: Stichting Metropool Internationale Kunstprojecten 2020, pp. 26-55more
In this essay, Ella Shohat argues that the question of the Arab-Jew, in contrast to present-day ethno-nationalist common sense, must be rearticulated as mutually constitutive categories, so as to address the complex imaginaries of both... more
In this essay, Ella Shohat argues that the question of the Arab-Jew, in contrast to present-day ethno-nationalist common sense, must be rearticulated as mutually constitutive categories, so as to address the complex imaginaries of both “the Arab” and “the Jew.” Elaborating on her earlier dialogue with Edward Said’s account of the bifurcated Oriental/Semitic myth-- one rendered as the Orientalist (the Jew) and the other as the Oriental (the Arab), Shohat offers a genealogical reading of this gradual splitting, locating it prior to the partition of Palestine and even to the emergence of Zionism, and tracing it back to the dissemination of a colonial-inflected Enlightenment discourse. More crucially, Shohat asks where the indigenous Jew of “the Orient,” and more specifically the Arab-Jew, might fit conceptually within this split? Today, with the epic-scale reconceptualization of belonging in the wake of partition, diasporization, and competing nationalist imaginaries, the Arab-Jew figure silently occupies an ambiguous position within the bifurcation. Yet a critical analysis of the Orientalist splitting that sidesteps the question of the Arab-Jew risks reproducing the fixed ethno-nationalist lexicon that posits Jewishness and Arabness as irreconcilable. At the same time, this very ambiguity, Shohat argues, was already fomented with the imperial “translation” of the Enlightenment project into a racialized idiom, now applied differentially to the Muslim and the Jew-within-the-Orient. “On Orientalist Genealogies” traces such representational ruptures back to the 19th century, examining various instances of what the essay regards as “the de-indigenization of the Arab-Jew.” To illustrate her thesis, Shohat examines the gendered imagining of both Jewish and Muslim communities within a relational and transnational comparative framework. Orientalist tropes such as the odalisque, the hammam, and the un/veiled female had long been projected onto Muslim and Jewish women throughout the region, but with the emergence of imperial “minorities” discourse, the exoticized Jew-in-the-Orient became the object of a gendered rescue phantasy-- as vividly illustrated in Dehodencq’s painting “L’Exécution de la Juive.” Rather than a document of Muslim anti-Semitism, however, the colonial visual archive inadvertently registers what Shohat defines as a “split-within-the split,” highlighting the novel formation of an ambivalent indigeneity for Arab-Jews within “the Orient.” Yet, the aesthetic dispositions also inadvertently and paradoxically reveal an underlying, thoroughly syncretic and shared Judeo-Muslim cultural geography. Here the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew reveals an intricate landscape of belonging that offers an alternative conceptual framework to discuss the ruptures prior to the grand rupture of partition, and to illuminate the post/colonial transformation that dramatically impacted the narrative of Jewish at-homeness within Muslim spaces.
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This essay examines the issue of linguistic belonging as invented within national and colonial itineraries. More specifically, it explores the genealogy of the notion of 'Judeo-Arabic language' and its axiomatic definition as a cohesive... more
This essay examines the issue of linguistic belonging as invented within national and colonial itineraries. More specifically, it explores the genealogy of the notion of 'Judeo-Arabic language' and its axiomatic definition as a cohesive unity separate from Arabic. Underscoring instead the terms deployed by Arabic-speaking Jews themselves, the essay asks whether the concept of 'Judeo-Arabic,' proposed by contemporary linguists, corresponds to the naming within the language itself or rather to a paradigm influenced by post-Haskala (Enlightenment) Judaic studies and Jewish nationalism. While recognizing the specificities of the Arabic(s) deployed by Jews, the essay interrogates the view of 'Judeo-Arabic' as classifiable under the historically novel rubric of isolatable 'Jewish languages' severed from their neighboring dialect/languages, in this case Arabic. It also casts doubt on an 'endangered language' discourse premised on the Arabic/Judeo-Arabic split, by asking whether the idea of a salvage project for a 'dying language' does not reproduce the same conceptual binaries that produced the disappearance of 'the language' in the first place. Despite the demographic dislocation from Arab spaces in the wake of Palestine's partition, the essay suggests, the Arabic(s) spoken by Jews have always beeb and have remained intimately linked, even now across the Israeli/Arab divide, forming part of a living assemblage of Arabic variations. Examining Arabic vernaculars as performed along a discursive spectrum from erudite to popular culture, the essay highlights Arabic/Hebrew syncretism, tracing the presence of Arabic, for example, in music and literature. Within a transnational approach, the essay stresses the phantasmic dimension that led to 'Judeo-Arabic,' in the wake of its displacement from Arabic-speaking cultural geographies, being simultaneously rejected and desired.
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Tracing Orientalism back to the two 1492s—of Iberia and of the Americas— the authors examine Latin America’s ambivalence toward its Moorish-Sephardic heritage. Once belonging to a shared cultural landscape, Muslims and Jews were later... more
Tracing Orientalism back to the two 1492s—of Iberia and of the Americas—
the authors examine Latin America’s ambivalence toward its Moorish-Sephardic heritage. Once belonging to a shared cultural landscape, Muslims and Jews were later seen by Ibero-American authorities as alien excrescences to be symbolically excised from a putatively pure body politic. Modernization came to be synonymous with Occidentalization. Using Gilberto Freyre’s work as a case study, the authors highlight his tracing of both patriarchal authoritarianism and sexual-racial flexibility in relation to Brazil’s Moorish lineage, as well as his recuperation of the Sephardi for the national formation of Brazil’s economy, science, and culture. Freyre’s revisionist project with regards to the Sephardi and the Moor, which offers a Luso-Brazilian apologia of miscegenation, must be understood in light of the omission of the enslaved African-Muslims from official history. The authors outline the “anxious affections” that the Janus-faced figure of the Moor/Sephardi has provoked in the Americas, thus disturbing facile analytical dichotomies of East/West and North/South.
the authors examine Latin America’s ambivalence toward its Moorish-Sephardic heritage. Once belonging to a shared cultural landscape, Muslims and Jews were later seen by Ibero-American authorities as alien excrescences to be symbolically excised from a putatively pure body politic. Modernization came to be synonymous with Occidentalization. Using Gilberto Freyre’s work as a case study, the authors highlight his tracing of both patriarchal authoritarianism and sexual-racial flexibility in relation to Brazil’s Moorish lineage, as well as his recuperation of the Sephardi for the national formation of Brazil’s economy, science, and culture. Freyre’s revisionist project with regards to the Sephardi and the Moor, which offers a Luso-Brazilian apologia of miscegenation, must be understood in light of the omission of the enslaved African-Muslims from official history. The authors outline the “anxious affections” that the Janus-faced figure of the Moor/Sephardi has provoked in the Americas, thus disturbing facile analytical dichotomies of East/West and North/South.
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Shohat and Stam put forward the idea of a Tropical Orientalism in Brazil. They interpret the contemporary Brazilian imaginary of the orient against the backdrop of a Moorish-Sephardi unconscious, thus highlighting not only the positive... more
Shohat and Stam put forward the idea of a Tropical Orientalism in Brazil. They interpret the contemporary Brazilian imaginary of the orient against the backdrop of a Moorish-Sephardi unconscious, thus highlighting not only the positive cross-Atlantic historical, discursive, and cultural links between "the Orient" and "the Occident," but also the anxieties that such links provoked.
This plenary presentation eulogizes Edward Said and speaks to his courage, passion, and scholarship, while simultaneously acknowledging his discomfort with the problematic category of " great men. " Shohat traces Said's early scholarship... more
This plenary presentation eulogizes Edward Said and speaks to his courage, passion, and scholarship, while simultaneously acknowledging his discomfort with the problematic category of " great men. " Shohat traces Said's early scholarship , the vitriolic backlash against his words, and the way his work consolidated what would, a decade later, become the fields of postcolonial studies and cultural studies. Shohat's presentation then delves into the circulation and reception of his critique of Orientalism as an example of " traveling theory. " In Middle East studies, Said has been criticized as a deficient political scientist or historian or anthropologist , with critics ignoring the central concern of his work: the problem of representation and the necessity of a political critique that is also a cultural critique. In postcolonial studies in Israel, a certain post-Zionist discourse privileged Homi Bhabha's theories of hybridity, which were translated into Hebrew, over Said's not-yet-translated and allegedly binaristic notions of coloniality. In the final moments of the presentation, Shohat reflects on her friendship with Edward Said, remembering his courage in the face of consistent attacks and his willingness to inhabit the ever-uncomfortable space of the worldly yet " out-of-place " intellectual.
Abstract by Ella Shohat and Evelyn Alsultany from the introduction to Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora "As a preamble to both sections of the collection, Ella Shohat’s essay “The... more
Abstract by Ella Shohat and Evelyn Alsultany from the introduction to Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora
"As a preamble to both sections of the collection, Ella Shohat’s essay “The Sephardi-Moorish Atlantic: Between Orientalism and Occidentalism” explores the impact and implications of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Asking when Orientalism begins, Shohat resituates Said’s post-Enlightenment framework, suggesting the Reconquista of Iberia and the Conquista of the Americas—the “two 1492s”—as an alternative starting point. Orientalism, she argues, was constituted in the Americas long before it was applied to the colonized French and British Middle East/North Africa, as part of an historically triangulated relationality between the geographies of Islam, Europe, and the Americas. Pre-existing Iberian phobic discourses about Jews and Muslims—what we would now call an Orientalist ideology—traveled to the Americas, “orientalizing” the indigenous peoples. The reading of Luso-Tropical texts (such as Gilberto Freyre’s), meanwhile, reveals that the Sephardi/Moor has co-existed with the opposite anxiety about the “Oriental” element in Iberian blood/culture, resulting in an Occidentalization/ de-Orientalization project of cleansing of the Sephardi/Moorish traces from the veins of Latin America. While some Latin American scholars have productively extended Said’s critique of post-Enlightenment Orientalism to the representation of Latin America, they have at the same time elided the centrality of the proto-Orientalism of the Reconquista and the ways in which the Conquista itself was already profoundly imbricated in anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism. Occidentalism—in Mignolo’s sense—and Orientalism—in Said’s sense—are interdependent, and can be seen as branches of Eurocentrism as they are intimately connected and mutually constitutive within the same historical moment. In doing so, Shohat also calls for a capacious and diasporic reconceptualization of area studies (including Middle East studies and Latin American studies) and ethnic studies (including Arab American Studies). Besides being a foundational text for postcolonial studies, Orientalism, Shohat argues, is also an Arab American studies text that must be understood within the American historical context in which it was written, against the backdrop of the transformed academic landscape impacted by ethnic studies, women’s studies, and Third World studies challenges to Eurocentric protocols. Shohat investigates the contemporary implications of Said’s final “Orientalism Now” chapter, noting that the current trend of transnational flows and the diasporization of Middle Eastern peoples call into question reified notions of regional boundaries. Rather than see “the Middle East” as a fixed sign with demarcated boundaries between East and West, Shohat argues that the scope of Middle Eastern studies and Arab American studies has to be mapped transnationally, subjected to a diasporic cross-border critique as a method of reading. What could be called a “diasporic turn” would help us conceptualize all regions in a more flexible and non-finalized manner, wherein each geography constitutes not a point of origin or final destination, but a terminal in a transnational network."
"As a preamble to both sections of the collection, Ella Shohat’s essay “The Sephardi-Moorish Atlantic: Between Orientalism and Occidentalism” explores the impact and implications of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Asking when Orientalism begins, Shohat resituates Said’s post-Enlightenment framework, suggesting the Reconquista of Iberia and the Conquista of the Americas—the “two 1492s”—as an alternative starting point. Orientalism, she argues, was constituted in the Americas long before it was applied to the colonized French and British Middle East/North Africa, as part of an historically triangulated relationality between the geographies of Islam, Europe, and the Americas. Pre-existing Iberian phobic discourses about Jews and Muslims—what we would now call an Orientalist ideology—traveled to the Americas, “orientalizing” the indigenous peoples. The reading of Luso-Tropical texts (such as Gilberto Freyre’s), meanwhile, reveals that the Sephardi/Moor has co-existed with the opposite anxiety about the “Oriental” element in Iberian blood/culture, resulting in an Occidentalization/ de-Orientalization project of cleansing of the Sephardi/Moorish traces from the veins of Latin America. While some Latin American scholars have productively extended Said’s critique of post-Enlightenment Orientalism to the representation of Latin America, they have at the same time elided the centrality of the proto-Orientalism of the Reconquista and the ways in which the Conquista itself was already profoundly imbricated in anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism. Occidentalism—in Mignolo’s sense—and Orientalism—in Said’s sense—are interdependent, and can be seen as branches of Eurocentrism as they are intimately connected and mutually constitutive within the same historical moment. In doing so, Shohat also calls for a capacious and diasporic reconceptualization of area studies (including Middle East studies and Latin American studies) and ethnic studies (including Arab American Studies). Besides being a foundational text for postcolonial studies, Orientalism, Shohat argues, is also an Arab American studies text that must be understood within the American historical context in which it was written, against the backdrop of the transformed academic landscape impacted by ethnic studies, women’s studies, and Third World studies challenges to Eurocentric protocols. Shohat investigates the contemporary implications of Said’s final “Orientalism Now” chapter, noting that the current trend of transnational flows and the diasporization of Middle Eastern peoples call into question reified notions of regional boundaries. Rather than see “the Middle East” as a fixed sign with demarcated boundaries between East and West, Shohat argues that the scope of Middle Eastern studies and Arab American studies has to be mapped transnationally, subjected to a diasporic cross-border critique as a method of reading. What could be called a “diasporic turn” would help us conceptualize all regions in a more flexible and non-finalized manner, wherein each geography constitutes not a point of origin or final destination, but a terminal in a transnational network."
Special Issue on "The State of Postcolonial Studies Continued - Responses to Dipesh Chakrabarty and Robert Young"
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This essay outlines the ‘structuring absence’ of postcolonial theory in dominant French discourse until quite recently, despite France's position as a multiracial post-colonial society and despite the central role of French and... more
This essay outlines the ‘structuring absence’ of postcolonial theory in dominant French discourse until quite recently, despite France's position as a multiracial post-colonial society and despite the central role of French and francophone anticolonial thinkers in postcolonial and critical race thought. The essay outlines the absence of postcolonial thought, cultural studies, and critical race studies in French intellectual production through the 1990s, as well as the ironies of this absence, and also points to recent French writing that works to account for this absence and highlight the continuities between France's colonial past and postcolonial present. The late 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, we argue, saw a burgeoning of scholarship on the part of French intellectuals who were committed to postcolonial critique. Especially after the 2005 rebellions in France, there emerged a growing scholarship – in the form of conferences, special issues of journals, co-edited volumes, collected works, anthologies and individual books – which was met with a series of critiques denying the connection between colonialism and the contemporary moment but which nonetheless generated a crucial and necessary intervention in French public life.
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“Stereotype, Representation and the Question of the Real: Some Methodological Proposals" (publication of keynote lecture at the 12th Annual Kyoto University International Symposium, Kyoto, 2008), in Racial Representations in Asia, Yasuko Takezawa ed., Kyoto University Press, Japan, 2011, pp. 20-31.more
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Originally published in New Literary History Volume 40, Number 3, Summer 2009. This essay explores the role of cross-national and cross-cultural comparison within the race and multicultural debates as they play across various national and... more
Originally published in New Literary History Volume 40, Number 3, Summer 2009. This essay explores the role of cross-national and cross-cultural comparison within the race and multicultural debates as they play across various national and cultural zones—most notably U.S.-American, French, and Brazilian. Rather than "do" comparison, it analyzes the variegated modalities of comparison itself. The essay deploys a relational and transnational method that seeks, ultimately, to compare comparisons, eludicating the insights and blindspots of different comparative approaches and frameworks, as well as the limitations of comparison itself. The essay discusses the ways that asymmetries of power impact the discourse and rhetoric of comparison, making them reciprocal or unilateral, dialogic or monologic. The essay explores as well the ways nation-states define themselves with and against other nations in a diacritical process of identity formation, partially through a rhetoric of (sometimes invidious) comparison. Cross-cultural and transnational comparisons, the essay argues, serve myriad purposes. Negotiating constantly between the facile universalism, which denies difference ("we're all human beings!") and the bellicose stigmatization of difference (good versus evil; us-versus-them), comparison at its best can trigger a salutary deprovincialization and mutual illumination. A particularly invidious kind of comparison, however, takes the form of civilizational ranking. Nationalist and pan-ethnic exceptionalisms sometimes go hand in hand with an especially invidious form of comparison: ranking. In Hegel's The Philosophy of History, for example, every attribute of Hegel's personal and national identity becomes associated with supreme rank. The methodological problem with comparison is the reciprocal reification of differences and the erasure of commonalities. "Ideal type" generalities homogenize very complex and variegated national formations, while denying common features. In a bipolar method of comparison, all individuals line up in conformity with a set of a priori characteristics. Roberto DaMatta's comparisons of the United States and Brazil, for example, leave both Brazilians and inhabitants of the United States locked up in a prison of identity in which there is no room for contradictions and anomalies, resulting in the "ontologization" of cultural difference. The essay then explores the variations in comparative method in three French commentators on Brazil: Jean de Lery, Levi-Strauss, and Roger Bastide. It concludes with metaphors and proposals that bring us beyond comparison through metaphors that lead to Atlanticist and diasporic approaches that bypass the nation state as frame.
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“Between America and the Orient: Notes on Popular Culture” (publication of keynote address, The German Association for American Studies, 2004) in America and the Orient, American Studies: A Monograph Series, Volume 130, Heike Schaefer, ed., Universitätsverlag, Heidelberg, Germany, 2006, pp. 217-227more
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This article is a published lecture delivered at the "Edward Said: A Continuing Legacy" conference, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. October 3, 2004.
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"Post-Fanon and the Colonial: A Situational Diagnosis" in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 250-289 (Expanded version of a paper delivered at the “Finding Fanon: Critical Genealogies” conference, co-organized by Mark Nash, Isaac Julien & Martha Gever, NYU, 1996.)more
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The essay focuses on the “travel”of various debates—orientalism, post-colonialism, postzionism—between the U.S. and Israel, between one institutional zone and political semantics and another. Through a comparative history of these... more
The essay focuses on the “travel”of various debates—orientalism, post-colonialism, postzionism—between the U.S. and Israel, between one institutional zone and political semantics and another. Through a comparative history of these critical intellectual debates, the author considers some key moments and issues in the “translation” of Said’s ideas into Hebrew. The reception of Said’s work is engaged in its contradictory dimensions, especially in liberal-leftist circles, where the desire to go-beyond-Said offers some ironic twists. The issues examined include: the nature of the “post” in the concepts of the “post-colonial” and “post-Zionism”; the problem of “hybridity”and “resistance” in the land of partitions and walls; and the mediation in Israel, via the Anglo- American academy, of the “subaltern” intellectual.
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This article was based on a lecture in conjunction with book-signing events for Talking Visions.
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Abstract by Lisa Suhair Majaj & Amal Amireh from the introduction to Going Global "The final essay, by Ella Shohat, "travels" not only between different continents but also between different genres of writing. The essay explores the role... more
Abstract by Lisa Suhair Majaj & Amal Amireh from the introduction to Going Global
"The final essay, by Ella Shohat, "travels" not only between different continents but also between different genres of writing. The essay explores the role played by reception contexts in several disparate geographies in legitimizing certain categories of identification and delegitimizing others. Shohat examines how the United States constructs dislocated subjects who have already been displaced in other Eurocentric contexts (as seen, for instance, in her own experience of growing up as an Iraqi in Israel), and whose United States experience then confronts them with "the border patrols of new world naming." By placing her own journey (Iraq, Israel, United States) vis-a-vis that of the artist Lynne Yamamoto (Japan, Hawaii, United States), Shohat creates a kind of a dialogue between geographies and histories that are usually kept separate. This strategy illustrates the theoretical arguments she has put forward elsewhere, as in her co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism, which argues for discussing cultures "in-relation" rather than as "neatly fenced-off areas of expertise." Shohat particularly challenges the "predicament of the single hyphen" in the master narrative of immigration to the United States. In this master narrative, the hegemonic discourses of the reception context, fixed within the rigid boundaries of the nation-state and its often concomitant nationalist ideology, dictate which identities in multiply-hyphenated identities are granted credence, and which are made invisible or even censored. Shohat makes her argument largely through the case of Arab-Jews, a community that has already been displaced within the context of Asia and Africa (e.g., from Morocco to Israel) prior to its arrival in the United States. Reading Shohat's partially autobiographical essay against the backdrop of her scholarly work, which has challenged the academic reception of the term "postcolonialism" as well as critiqued the hegemonic narrative of "feminism," facilitates a reexamination of the relationship between the institutional reception of critical ideas and that of the critics voicing them. Her essay brings into focus the issues explored throughout the collection, making clear the impact of reception contexts in determining not only how texts are received but also how writers and others are constructed as subjects."
"The final essay, by Ella Shohat, "travels" not only between different continents but also between different genres of writing. The essay explores the role played by reception contexts in several disparate geographies in legitimizing certain categories of identification and delegitimizing others. Shohat examines how the United States constructs dislocated subjects who have already been displaced in other Eurocentric contexts (as seen, for instance, in her own experience of growing up as an Iraqi in Israel), and whose United States experience then confronts them with "the border patrols of new world naming." By placing her own journey (Iraq, Israel, United States) vis-a-vis that of the artist Lynne Yamamoto (Japan, Hawaii, United States), Shohat creates a kind of a dialogue between geographies and histories that are usually kept separate. This strategy illustrates the theoretical arguments she has put forward elsewhere, as in her co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism, which argues for discussing cultures "in-relation" rather than as "neatly fenced-off areas of expertise." Shohat particularly challenges the "predicament of the single hyphen" in the master narrative of immigration to the United States. In this master narrative, the hegemonic discourses of the reception context, fixed within the rigid boundaries of the nation-state and its often concomitant nationalist ideology, dictate which identities in multiply-hyphenated identities are granted credence, and which are made invisible or even censored. Shohat makes her argument largely through the case of Arab-Jews, a community that has already been displaced within the context of Asia and Africa (e.g., from Morocco to Israel) prior to its arrival in the United States. Reading Shohat's partially autobiographical essay against the backdrop of her scholarly work, which has challenged the academic reception of the term "postcolonialism" as well as critiqued the hegemonic narrative of "feminism," facilitates a reexamination of the relationship between the institutional reception of critical ideas and that of the critics voicing them. Her essay brings into focus the issues explored throughout the collection, making clear the impact of reception contexts in determining not only how texts are received but also how writers and others are constructed as subjects."
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"Breaking the Silence," A plenary speech, the 10th Annual Women’s Conference, Givat Haviva, June 16-18, 1994, published in Hebrew, Hila News, Vol. 50, July 1994; and in English, News from Within, 10:8, August 1994. Republished in Shohat's On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements, 2017more
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Please note that this is the original version of this essay. It has been published in other forms that include changes made without the author's approval, and the correct version is found here. Elia Suleiman's New York-based film... more
Please note that this is the original version of this essay. It has been published in other forms that include changes made without the author's approval, and the correct version is found here.
Elia Suleiman's New York-based film Homage by Assassination (1992) incorporates a few segments from Shohat's article, written during the 1990-91 Gulf War. Shohat & Suleiman rewrote the segments as a letter from Ella Habiba Shohat to her friend Elia Suleiman. As Suleiman receives the faxed letter, Shohat is heard in a voice-over reading from "Reflections of an Arab-Jew."
Elia Suleiman's New York-based film Homage by Assassination (1992) incorporates a few segments from Shohat's article, written during the 1990-91 Gulf War. Shohat & Suleiman rewrote the segments as a letter from Ella Habiba Shohat to her friend Elia Suleiman. As Suleiman receives the faxed letter, Shohat is heard in a voice-over reading from "Reflections of an Arab-Jew."
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“Re-enactments and Transcripts” of a conversation published in Anywhere but Now: Landscapes of Belonging in the Eastern Mediterranean, coedited by Samar Kanafani, Munira Khayyat, Rasha Salti, and Layla Al-Zubaidi (Beirut: Heinrich Böll... more
“Re-enactments and Transcripts” of a conversation published in Anywhere but Now: Landscapes of Belonging in the Eastern Mediterranean, coedited by Samar Kanafani, Munira Khayyat, Rasha Salti, and Layla Al-Zubaidi (Beirut: Heinrich Böll Foundation, Middle East Office, 2012). The conversation and the Q & A with the audience, which was transcribed by Hiba Haidar, took place after the screening of Samir’s Forget Baghdad:
Arabs and Jews – the Iraqi Connection at the opening of a three-day public symposium, “Anywhere but Now,” organized by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and held at the Beirut Art Center. Conducted by independent curator and writer Rasha Salti and Layla Al-Zubaidi, director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Middle East Office, the conversation took place between Beirut and NY via Live Satellite Broadcast (April 2, 2009).
Arabs and Jews – the Iraqi Connection at the opening of a three-day public symposium, “Anywhere but Now,” organized by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and held at the Beirut Art Center. Conducted by independent curator and writer Rasha Salti and Layla Al-Zubaidi, director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Middle East Office, the conversation took place between Beirut and NY via Live Satellite Broadcast (April 2, 2009).
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“Talking Visions, Talking Art, Talking Politics: Meera Sethi’s Conversation with Ella Shohat about Talking Visions,” Parts 1 & 2 in Politics & Culture, Issue 1, 2002 (republication of the conversation in Fuse: A Magazine About Issues of Art and Culture, Toronto, Nov 30, 2000, 23:4; & April 2001)more
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“Ha-Shvira ve-ha-Shiva: ‘Itzuv shel Epistemologia Mizrahit" (Hebrew translation of "Rupture and Return: The Shaping of a Mizrahi Epistemology,” Hagar, 2001), Yigal Nizri ed., Hazut Mizrahit (Eastern Appearance: A Present that Stirs in the Thickets of its Arab Past), Tel Aviv: Bavel, 2004, pp. 45-81more
This article proposes a study about Cleopatra's representation throughout the last century, situating the debate on her looks and origins among colonial domination, anti-colonial struggles and post-colonial racial frictions that, as it... more
This article proposes a study about Cleopatra's representation throughout the last century, situating the debate on her looks and origins among colonial domination, anti-colonial struggles and post-colonial racial frictions that, as it tries to demonstrate, add another dimension towards understanding the investment in Cleopatra's identity.
In her essay, "On Imitation and the Art of Kdinapping", Ella Shohat attempts to articulate aspects of a resistant aesthetics, looking at Yigal Nizri's artwork, "Tiger," featured on the cover. The article links seemingly distant... more
In her essay, "On Imitation and the Art of Kdinapping", Ella Shohat attempts to articulate aspects of a resistant aesthetics, looking at Yigal Nizri's artwork, "Tiger," featured on the cover. The article links seemingly distant geographies around the question of mimesis. In Israel, "kitsch" artifacts, such as tiger blankets and works in needlepoint, are accompanied by a certain Mizrahi nostalgia that revives images of colonial exotica. Kitsch aesthetics tends toward mimicry due to the imbibing of mimetic values in the western arts, even when it is made in "bad taste" and reproduced mechanically for mass consumption. According to Shohat, the metanarrative that organizes art history as a linear march moving from realism through modernism to postmodernism is Eurocentric. Given the taboo on graven images, Judeo-Muslim culture, for example, preferred anti-mimetic aesthetics. The essay points to a dialectic between Mimesis and its negation, recycled, in some ways, into popular visual culture.
Ella Shohat is a Professor of Cultural Studies, Middle East studies and Comparative Literature at New York University.
Ella Shohat is a Professor of Cultural Studies, Middle East studies and Comparative Literature at New York University.
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Este artigo pretende incorporar uma questão pouco mencionada no discurso crítico sobre Israel e o sionismo: a presença dos judeus árabes e orientais, os sefarditas, oriundos em grande parte de países árabes e muçulmanos. Uma análise mais... more
Este artigo pretende incorporar uma questão pouco mencionada no discurso crítico sobre Israel e o sionismo: a presença dos judeus árabes e orientais, os sefarditas, oriundos em grande parte de países árabes e muçulmanos. Uma análise mais completa deve incluir as conseqüências negativas do sionismo não apenas para o povo palestino, mas também para os judeus sefarditas. A rejeição sionista do Oriente palestino e árabe-muçulmano tem por ilação a rejeição dos mizrahim (os "orientais"), os quais, assim como os palestinos, também tiveram o direito de auto-representação extirpado.
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Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices brings together twelve essays by Ella Shohat, the trailblazing Israeli-Arab-Jewish scholar of postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies, whose key interventions in the intellec- tual debates around... more
Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices brings together twelve essays by Ella Shohat, the trailblazing Israeli-Arab-Jewish scholar of postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies, whose key interventions in the intellec- tual debates around national discourse, hyphenated identities, feminist ...
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Research Interests: History, Sociology, Enlightenment, Hegemony, Multidisciplinary, and 7 moreZionism, Icon, Citation, Scholarship, Download, ICON, and Social Text
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... Meanwhile the bank's officers of reform are free to come and go, demanding ransoms in the form of cuts to the social economy in exchange for further aid to business, demonstrating that discussion of corruption always requires... more
... Meanwhile the bank's officers of reform are free to come and go, demanding ransoms in the form of cuts to the social economy in exchange for further aid to business, demonstrating that discussion of corruption always requires a look at the very ... Randy Martin and Ella Shohat ...
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Displacement as metonym (in the sense of actual movement from place to place) and as metaphor (in the sense of comparable displacements) forms a binding thread that runs through On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements. For... more
Displacement as metonym (in the sense of actual movement from place to place) and as metaphor (in the sense of comparable displacements) forms a binding thread that runs through On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements. For this reason, I found Steve Sabella’s “38 Days of ReCollection” (2014) to suggestively convey the thrust of this book, and selected it for the cover. The basic material of Sabella’s Re-Collection” series -B & W photo emulsion spread on swashes of color paint scraped from the interior walls of houses in Jerusalem’s Old City -strangely parallels this book project itself, also composed of fragments gathered from several decades of work and now “housed” in this collection. The stand-alone materiality of the piece, literally extracted from a wall, conveys a layered history through palpable layers of paint. The scraped paint with its several strata of color, forms a literal palimpsest, testifying as it were to the various hands that had painted each one. The turquoise in particular evokes the greenish shades of the wall paint color commonly preferred by indigenous communities of the region (whether Muslims, Christians, or Jews) to protect against the evil spirits. Scraping thus becomes both an act of excavation of the buried substrata of forgotten lives, as well as a means to visualize again intermingled lives.
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While the ethnic/religious term "Arab-Jew" has at the very least been the object of heated debate and polemics, the linguistic/cultural term "Judeo- Arabic," paradoxically, has been widely accepted as a legitimate... more
While the ethnic/religious term "Arab-Jew" has at the very least been the object of heated debate and polemics, the linguistic/cultural term "Judeo- Arabic," paradoxically, has been widely accepted as a legitimate object of scholarly inquiry-especially within the realm of Jewish studies. Most languages, including the languages or dialects spoken by Jews, are palimpsestically complex and layered with various linguistic strata. Yet the case of Judeo-Arabic raises complex questions. This complexity is partially traceable to the persistence of the "Arab versus Jew" dichotomy, as well as to the corollary negation of the "Judeo-Muslim" hyphen, which had been crucial for the genealogy of Arabic written and spoken by Jews for millennia. Against the conceptual binary that mandates that "Jew" and "Arab" be antonyms, I argue that the linguistic/cultural question of "Judeo-Arabic" is inseparable from the ethnic/religious concept of the "Arab-Jew." My argument here is premised on my earlier critique of the taboos against joining the word "Jewishness" with the word "Arabness" (a taboo encapsulated in the very term "Arab-Jew") as well as against joining the word "Judeo" with the word "Muslim" (encapsulated in the "Judeo-Muslim"). That critique has been central to my scholarly work over the past three decades. Does the good/bad bifurcation between the terms "Arab-Jew" and "Judeo-Arabic" as objects of analysis reflect a different ideational status of the hyphen in the two terms (i.e., linking Jews to Arabs in the case of "the Arab-Jew" while delinking a Jewish language from Arabic in the case of "Judeo-Arabic")? Rather than take for granted "Judeo-Arabic" as a fixed natural language, I argue that the term-like "Arab-Jew"-requires a critical engagement. Both terms are equally entangled in the anxiety provoked by the idea of an Arab cultural genealogy for a Jewish identity.This essay does not concern itself with the extremely rich, indeed invaluable, scholarship in the related fields of "Judeo-Arabic" and "Jewish languages." Rather, it attempts to examine the implications of these terms, assumptions, and axioms for identity mapping. The essay interrogates the premises and conceptual frameworks associated with the rubric of "Judeo- Arabic language." If Jewish studies scholars have tended to conceive "Judeo- Arabic" within a ghettoizing approach to the history and culture of "the Jews," scholars within Arab studies have treated it with skepticism. Arab studies scholars ask, in effect, whether Judeo-Arabic even has any actual existence apart from its source language-Arabic. Rather than divide these two zones of inquiry, I hope to bring them into dialogue through addressing some of the specificities of Arabic written and spoken by Jews. In doing so, I cast doubt on the view of "Judeo-Arabic" as always-already belonging to the separate realm of "Jewish languages," which is itself arguably a newly invented and in some ways problematic category. At times, scholarly discussions within Jewish studies have acknowledged the difficulty that the "Jewish languages" rubric poses for linguistics scholars. Often, however, these projects have gone beyond invoking this category as a sociolinguistic classification to embracing "the uniquely Jewish" character of an increasingly expanding number of "Jewish languages of the Diaspora."1 Both the qualitative and quantitative procedures assume Jewish linguistic uniqueness, implicitly homologizing the idea of a unified national expression. This essay, in contrast, highlights multiple relations, addressing "Jewish languages" generally and "Judeo- Arabic" more specifically as linked not merely to other "Jewish languages," but also to any number of related languages and similar dialects within the various cultural geographies from which they emerged. I address the case of "Judeo-Arabic" simultaneously in relation to the notions of "Jewish languages" (safot yehudiyot in Hebrew) and of "Arabic dialects" (al-lahjat al-'arabiyya in Arabic). …
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L’opposition des universitaires à la guerre du Golfe (1991) a mobilisé bon nombre de termes familiers – « impérialisme », « néocolonialisme », « néoimpérialisme » – dans une contreoffensive contre le Nouvel Ordre Mondial. Mais un terme a... more
L’opposition des universitaires à la guerre du Golfe (1991) a mobilisé bon nombre de termes familiers – « impérialisme », « néocolonialisme », « néoimpérialisme » – dans une contreoffensive contre le Nouvel Ordre Mondial. Mais un terme a brillé par son absence – le terme « postcolonial » – même dans les discours des personnalités les mieux connues qui l’employaient d’habitude. Étant donnée l’extraordinaire circulation du terme dans les colloques universitaires, les publications et les nouveau..
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... This link, both metonymic and metaphoric, had been a staple of didactic Israeli films (Hill 24 ... But since Middle Eastern Jews spoil the image of Israel as a Western country, interviews were ... A Line in the Sand, featured Peter... more
... This link, both metonymic and metaphoric, had been a staple of didactic Israeli films (Hill 24 ... But since Middle Eastern Jews spoil the image of Israel as a Western country, interviews were ... A Line in the Sand, featured Peter Jennings standing upon a colorful political map of the ...
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... Tali hon! ... My dress stained with mud, I ran to the house, only to find myself speaking with a military policeman searching for my shy and muscular uncle, Nachman.(His older sisters named him after Haim Nachman Bialik, the Hebrew... more
... Tali hon! ... My dress stained with mud, I ran to the house, only to find myself speaking with a military policeman searching for my shy and muscular uncle, Nachman.(His older sisters named him after Haim Nachman Bialik, the Hebrew national poet, who years later became known ...
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By applying the concept of the “Red Atlantic,” partially inspired by that of “the Black Atlantic,” the chapter shows how the mobility and interchange between Europeans and the indigenous populations of the Americas is a quintessential... more
By applying the concept of the “Red Atlantic,” partially inspired by that of “the Black Atlantic,” the chapter shows how the mobility and interchange between Europeans and the indigenous populations of the Americas is a quintessential example of “traveling theory.” It discusses diverse cultural and historical materials telling of the transnational flow of ideas around the figure of the Indian and the multifaceted encounters among various linguistic/cultural zones. It is suggested that the dialogue between European and indigenous thought has become part of such varied progressive causes as Jacobin and socialist revolutions, confederation and the separation of powers, class, gender and sexual equality, communal property, ecology, jouissance, anti-productivism, and alter-globalization.
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... prefer the phrase love of countrycan be summed up in a few words and principles: the love of one's country and compatriots; a hope for and ... real point is to change the frame, even in terms of the sacred cow of... more
... prefer the phrase love of countrycan be summed up in a few words and principles: the love of one's country and compatriots; a hope for and ... real point is to change the frame, even in terms of the sacred cow of patriotism.(We must turn a sacred cow into a vache qui rit.) By our ...
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This essay is taken from a book that criticizes the abuse of the concept of patriotism by the American right wing. At the same time it engages polemically with anti-Americans, whether rightists or leftists. Present-day tensions, the essay... more
This essay is taken from a book that criticizes the abuse of the concept of patriotism by the American right wing. At the same time it engages polemically with anti-Americans, whether rightists or leftists. Present-day tensions, the essay argues, must be seen against the backdrop of the much longer history of not only colonialism and imperialism but various national mythologies. At times, we argue, “anti-Americanism” is a completely rational response to specific offenses by the U.S. government or by U.S.–led transnational corporations; yet at other times legitimate critique becomes mingled with blind obsessions, paranoid projections, and even defensive guilt. Examining abuses of the concept of patriotism, the work focuses on various national mythologies and exceptionalisms, and on myriad forms of patriotism, in terms of the following questions: What are the long-term historical sources and current manifestations of love and hate, pride and anger, in patriotic nationalism? How did patriotism in the United States become so thoroughly militarized? How do rival conceptions of patriotism interact and interpenetrate across national boundaries? How did we arrive at this point of crisis? How have countries such as Brazil, France, and the United States tended to imagine one another, and for what historical reasons, and what has changed in the present? What is the role of narcissism both in American superpatriotism and in anti-Americanism?
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ABSTRACT Tracing Orientalism back to the two 1492s—of Iberia and of the Americas—the authors examine Latin America’s ambivalence toward its Moorish-Sephardic heritage. Once belonging to a shared cultural landscape, Muslims and Jews were... more
ABSTRACT Tracing Orientalism back to the two 1492s—of Iberia and of the Americas—the authors examine Latin America’s ambivalence toward its Moorish-Sephardic heritage. Once belonging to a shared cultural landscape, Muslims and Jews were later seen by Ibero-American authorities as alien excrescences to be symbolically excised from a putatively pure body politic. Modernization came to be synonymous with Occidentalization. Using Gilberto Freyre’s work as a case study, the authors highlight his tracing of both patriarchal authoritarianism and sexual-racial flexibility in relation to Brazil’s Moorish lineage, as well as his recuperation of the Sephardi for the national formation of Brazil’s economy, science, and culture. Freyre’s revisionist project with regards to the Sephardi and the Moor, which offers a Luso-Brazilian apologia of miscegenation, must be understood in light of the omission of the enslaved African-Muslims from official history. The authors outline the “anxious affections” that the Janus-faced figure of the Moor/Sephardi has provoked in the Americas, thus disturbing facile analytical dichotomies of East/West and North/South.
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Questia Home Search the library Browse the library Read Workspace. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Read/Write Review. Search Inside This Book. View Checked Search Results. Members Also Read These. Shared... more
Questia Home Search the library Browse the library Read Workspace. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Read/Write Review. Search Inside This Book. View Checked Search Results. Members Also Read These. Shared Notes On This Item. Forum ...
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... We are also grateful to Tony Kushner, Alissa Solomon, Moncef Cheikhrouhou, Mark Cohen, evelyn Alsultany, Shaista Husain, Yigal nizri, Zillah eisenstein, and Yvette ... The antiglobalizers, meanwhile, might love Bruce Springsteen and... more
... We are also grateful to Tony Kushner, Alissa Solomon, Moncef Cheikhrouhou, Mark Cohen, evelyn Alsultany, Shaista Husain, Yigal nizri, Zillah eisenstein, and Yvette ... The antiglobalizers, meanwhile, might love Bruce Springsteen and Michael Moore for their adversary stance. ...