Description
Book SynopsisDemonstrates that gender, cultural difference, and colonial history are intimately bound together and often can only be understood in relation to one another. The author analyzes how diverse representational practices - be they visual, textual, or even scientific - relate to the construction of gender, race, sexuality, and national identity.
Trade Review“Amplitude, in both scope and wavelength, is the operative word for these essays. Each essay breaks out a cascade of examples—the sheer wealth of citation alone makes this volume exceptional. Its vibrant combination of skepticism and generosity is Ella Shohat’s trademark.”—Mary Louise Pratt, author of
Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation“Ella Shohat’s writing explores the volatile border regions where feminist theory meets anticolonial thought and where the politics of culture encounters the powers of imperialist reason. What she writes is important, inspiring, and fearless.”—Timothy Mitchell, author of
Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity“From her keen observations about the politics of knowledge production in the U.S. university, to her canny elucidation of the gendered geographies of colonial cinema, to her critical engagements with post-Zionist discourse, Ella Shohat’s bold intelligence is unparalleled. This volume collects her key interventions that have shaped and illuminated the debates we have come to know as multiculturalism, postcolonial discourse, and transnational feminism.”—Lisa Lowe, coeditor of
The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital“[T]he collection functions as a window onto the issues and dilemmas confronted by an interdisciplinary cultural studies since the late 1980s, namely, the concerns raised by multiculturalism, transnational feminism, diaspora, and postcolonialism. However, the larger accomplishment of the volume is that it reveals a pioneering mode of cultural criticism that may be definitively viewed as a ‘post-orientalist’ practice of knowledge. . . . As an essayist, [Shohat] has a knack for constructing a platform of inquiry through a prism of complexities and interrelationships, and for scrutinizing a given phenomenon of culture along multiple axes, investments, and stakes. These qualities make this a valuable book, and we may hope that more from Shohat is in the works.” -- Saloni Mathur * CAA Reviews *
Table of ContentsIllustrations ix
Preface xiii
Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge: Area Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies 1
Gender and the Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema 17
Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies of Adaption 70
The Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference, Power (with Robert Stam) 106
“Lasers for Ladies”: Endo Discourse and the Inscriptions of Science 139
Disorienting Cleopatra: A Modern Trope of Identity 166
Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews 201
Notes on the “Post-Colonial” 233
Post-Fanon and the Colonial: A Situational Diagnosis 250
Post-Third Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema 290
Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews 330
The “Postcolonial” in Translation: Reading Edward Said between English and Hebrew 359
Index 385
