Description
Book SynopsisJessica Dubow is Reader in Cultural Geography at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and the author of
Settling the Self: Colonial Space, Colonial Identity and the South African Landscape (2009). She has also published in numerous leading journals including
: Critical Inquiry,
New German Critique,
Art History,
The Journal of Visual Culture,
Comparative Literature and
Parallax .
Trade ReviewIn Exile is an eloquently written book, even as it covers an impressive amount of dense literature ... [it] is a strong and impressive intellectual exercise, which invites readers to take its findings and mount a weighty political challenge. * Reading Religion *
This is a brilliant and profound study of the
spatial basis of Judaic thought. Thanks to a
constellatory investigation
of thinkers such as Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin, she shows how
exile produces a form of critical surplus, a distinct form of critical consciousness. * Michael Löwy, Emeritus Research Director, National Centre for Scientific Research, France *
From a cultural geographer's appreciation for landscape, emplacement, and subjectivity, Jessica Dubow brilliantly explores the valencies of exile, rootedness, territoriality, and belonging. With eloquence and erudition, she draws on the deepest knowledge of the history of art and aesthetics, literary theory, history of philosophy, and the widest possibilities of Frankfurt-inclined critical theory. * Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA *
In beautifully evocative prose, the author offers the fresh voice of a cultural geographer to the analysis of secular Jewish thought. In doing so, Dubow gifts us with a genuinely novel approach to the dialectics of secularism and theology. This book opens our understanding of the space that exile can carve out for intellectual creativity. * Scott Spector, Rudolf Mrázek Professor of History and German Studies, University of Michigan, USA *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Exile at the Origin Chapter 1 – “A Patch of Ground Between Four Tent Pegs” Chapter 2 – The Second Commandment in the Second Empire Chapter 3 – Liberal Pluralism and the Mourning Work of Assimilation Chapter 4 – ‘Wherever you go you will be a polis”: Hannah Arendt via Rahel Varnhagen Chapter 5 – Posthumous Place: W.G. Sebald and the Problem of Landscape Epilogue: Exile as Source and Resource
