Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices

Ella Shohat, Caren Kaplan, Robyn Wiegman, Caren Kaplan, Robyn Wiegman

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780822337713, 9780822337584
• eBook ISBN: 9780822387961
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices brings together for the first time a selection of trailblazing essays by Ella Shohat, an internationally renowned theorist of postcolonial and cultural studies of Iraqi-Jewish background. Written over the past two decades, these twelve essays—some classic, some less known, some new—trace a powerful intellectual trajectory as Shohat rigorously teases out the consequences of a deep critique of Eurocentric epistemology, whether to rethink feminism through race, nationalism through ethnicity, or colonialism through sexuality.

Shohat's critical method boldly transcends disciplinary and geographical boundaries. She explores such issues as the relations between ethnic studies and area studies, the paradoxical repercussions for audio-visual media of the "graven images" taboo, the allegorization of race through the refiguring of Cleopatra, the allure of imperial popular culture, and the gender politics of medical technologies. She also examines the resistant poetics of exile and displacement; the staging of historical memory through the commemorations of the two 1492s, the anomalies of the "national" in Zionist discourse, the implications of the hyphen in the concept "Arab-Jew," and the translation of the debates on orientalism and postcolonialism across geographies. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices not only illuminates many of the concerns that have animated the study of cultural politics over the past two decades; it also points toward new scholarly possibilities.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge: Area Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies
• Gender and the Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema
• Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies of Adaptation
• The Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference, Power (with Robert Stam)
• ‘‘Lasers for Ladies’’: Endo Discourse and the Inscriptions of Science
• Disorienting Cleopatra: A Modern Trope of Identity
• Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews
• Notes on the ‘‘Post-Colonial’’
• Post-Fanon and the Colonial: A Situational Diagnosis
• Post–Third Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema
• Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews
• The ‘‘Postcolonial’’ in Translation: Reading Edward Said between English and Hebrew
• Index