Description
Book SynopsisAn examination of how popular culture is received and produced within the Middle East.
Trade Review“Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg’s volume
Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture makes an invaluable contribution to the growing field of Middle Eastern cultural studies. Refusing essentialist understandings of culture, the editors and authors also transcend traditional Marxist paradigms. The volume insightfully illuminates the often marginalized issue of the politics of culture within the contested terrain of Palestine and Israel.”—Ella Shohat, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Cultural Studies, New York University
“This empirically rich, theoretically innovative, and unusually wide-ranging volume brings together a set of fascinating and insightful explorations of the popular culture and cultural politics of Palestine/Israel, including music, cinema, television, cyberculture, tourism, comics, and the role of Israel and the Jews in U. S. evangelical Christian eschatology. By demonstrating how culture has been a crucial and often formative domain of contention both within and between Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine over the past century and down to the present day, the contributors open up a great deal of extremely valuable terrain that has been sorely neglected until now.”—Zachary Lockman, author of
Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism“This theoretically savvy, eye-opening tour through popular culture in and about Palestine and Israel confirms at once the inherent inseparability of culture/politics and the gripping mutuality of Israel/Palestine.”—Lila Abu-Lughod, author of
Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt"[P]rovocative. . . . [T]he essays in this volume . . . imaginatively deconstruct aspects of popular culture still seeping across the walls erected through this long and intractable conflict." -- Donna Robinson Divine * Digest of Middle East Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction: Popular Culture, Transnationality, and Radical History / Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg 1
I. Historical Articulations
Wasif Jawhariyyeh, Popular Music, and Early Modernity in Jerusalem / Salim Tamari 27
The Palestinian Press in Mandatory Jaffa: Advertising, Nationalism, and the Public Sphere / Mark LeVine 51
Post-Zionism and Its Popular Cultures / Ilan Pappé 77
II. Cinemas and Cyberspaces
Cross/Cast: Passing in Israeli and Palestinian Cinema / Carol Bardenstein 99
Virtual Nation: Palestinian Cyberculture in Lebanese Camps / Laleh Khalili 126
Is There a Palestinian National Cinema?: The National and Transnational in Palestinian Film Production / Livia Alexander 150
III. The Politics of Music
Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music / Joseph Massad 175
Dueling Nativities: Zehava Ben Sings Umm Kulthum / Amy Horowitz 202
Against Hybridity: The Case of Enrico Macias/Gaston Chrenassia / Ted Swedenburg 231
IV. Regional and Global Circuits
"First Contact" and Other Israeli Fictions: Tourism, Globalization, and the Middle East Peace Process / Rebecca L. Stein 259
Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular: The
Left Behind Series and Christian Evangelicalism's New World Order / Melani McAlister 288
Telling Stories in
Palestine: Comix Understanding and Narratives of Palestine-Israel / Mary Layoun 313
Sentimentality and Redemption: The Rhetoric of Egyptian Pop Culture Intifada Solidarity / Elliott Cola 338
Bibliography 365
Contributors 397
Index 401
