Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices

Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices
Author: Ella Shohat
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2006-07-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822387964

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.

Transnational Feminism in the United States

Transnational Feminism in the United States
Author: Leela Fernandes
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-03-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0814770339

The acceleration of economic globalization and the rapid global flows of people, culture, and information have intensified the importance of developing transnational understandings of contemporary issues. Transnational Feminism in the United States examines how transnational perspectives shape the ways in which we create and disseminate knowledge about the world within the United States, and how the paradigm of transnational feminism is affected by national narratives and public discourses within the country itself. An innovative theoretical project that is both deconstructive and constructive, this bookinterrogates the limits of feminist thought, primarily through case studies that illustrate its power to create new fields of research out of traditionally interdisciplinary lines of inquiry. Leela Fernandes discusses ways to approach, analyze, and capture processes that exceed and unsettle the nation-state within the transnational feminist paradigm. Examining the links between power and knowledge that bind interdisciplinary theory and research, she shines new light on issues such as human rights as well as academic debates about transnational feminist perspectives on global issues. A thought-provoking analysis, Transnational Feminism in the United States powerfully contributes to the field of Women’s Studies and related cross-disciplinary scholarship on feminist theory and gender from a global perspective. Leela Fernandes is Professor of Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of Michigan, and author of India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform; Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills; and Transforming Feminist Practice.

Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas

Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas
Author: Aviad Moreno
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2024-06-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253069688

Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas explores how the 30,000 Jews in northern Morocco developed a sense of kinship with modern Spain, medieval Sepharad, and the broader Hispanophone world that was unlike anything experienced elsewhere. The Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora, as this group is often called by its scholars and its community leaders, also became one of the most mobile and globally dispersed North African groups in the twentieth century, with major hubs in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Spain, Israel, Canada, France, and the US, among others. Drawing on an array of communal sources from across this diaspora, Aviad Moreno explores how narratives of ancestry in Spain, Israel, Morocco, and several Latin American countries interconnected the diaspora, empowering its hubs across the globe throughout the twentieth century and beyond. By investigating these mechanisms of diaspora formation in a small community that once shared the same space in Morocco,Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas challenges national accounts of the broader Jewish diasporas and adds complexity to the annals of multilayered ethnic communities on the move.

Between the Middle East and the Americas

Between the Middle East and the Americas
Author: Evelyn Alsultany
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2013-02-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472069446

Perceptions of the Middle East in conflicting discourses from North America, South America, and Europe

Natives against Nativism

Natives against Nativism
Author: Olivia C. Harrison
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2023-04-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1452965080

Examining the intersection of Palestine solidarity movements and antiracist activism in France from the 1970s to the present For the pasty fifty years, the Palestinian question has served as a rallying cry in the struggle for migrant rights in postcolonial France, from the immigrant labor associations of the 1970s and Beur movements of the 1980s to the militant decolonial groups of the 2000s. In Natives against Nativism, Olivia C. Harrison explores the intersection of anticolonial solidarity and antiracist activism from the 1970s to the present. Natives against Nativism analyzes a wide range of texts—novels, memoirs, plays, films, and militant archives—that mobilize the twin figures of the Palestinian and the American Indian in a crossed critique of Eurocolonial modernity. Harrison argues that anticolonial solidarity with Palestinians and Indigenous Americans has been instrumental in developing a sophisticated critique of racism across imperial formations—in this case, France, the United States, and Israel. Serving as the first relational study of antiracism in France, Natives against Nativism observes how claims to indigeneity have been deployed in multiple directions, both in the ongoing struggle for migrant rights and racial justice, and in white nativist claims in France today.

The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture

The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture
Author: Jessica Retis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 628
Release: 2019-03-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 111923672X

A multidisciplinary, authoritative outline of the current intellectual landscape of the field. Over the past three decades, the term ‘diaspora’ has been featured in many research studies and in wider theoretical debates in areas such as communications, the humanities, social sciences, politics, and international relations. The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture explores new dimensions of human mobility and connectivity—presenting state-of-the-art research and key debates on the intersection of media, cultural, and diasporic studies This innovative and timely book helps readers to understand diasporic cultures and their impact on the globalized world. The Handbook presents contributions from internationally-recognized scholars and researchers to strengthen understanding of diasporas and diasporic cultures, diasporic media and cultural resources, and the various forms of diasporic organization, expression, production, distribution, and consumption. Divided into seven sections, this wide-ranging volume covers topics such as methodological challenges and innovations in diasporic research, the construction of diasporic identity, the politics of diasporic integration, the intersection of gender and generation with the diasporic condition, new technologies in media, and many others. A much-needed resource for anyone with interest diasporic studies, this book: Presents new and original theory, research, and essays Employs unique methodological and conceptual debates Offers contributions from a multidisciplinary team of scholars and researchers Explores new and emerging trends in the study of diasporas and media Applies a wide-ranging, international perspective to the subject Due to its international perspective, interdisciplinary approach, and wide range of authors from around the world, The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture is ideal for undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, lecturers, and researchers in areas that focus on the relationship of media and society, ethnic identity, race, class and gender, globalization and immigration, and other relevant fields.

Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures

Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures
Author: Anita Norich
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2016-04-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0472121677

This collection of essays brings to Jewish Language Studies the conceptual frameworks that have become increasingly important to Jewish Studies more generally: transnationalism, multiculturalism, globalization, hybrid cultures, multilingualism, and interlingual contexts. Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures collects work from prominent scholars in the field, bringing world literary and linguistic perspectives to generate distinctively new historical, cultural, theoretical, and scientific approaches to this topic of ongoing interest. Chapters of this edited volume consider from multiple angles the cultural politics of myths, fantasies, and anxieties of linguistic multiplicity in the history, cultures, folkways, and politics of global Jewry. Methodological range is as important to this project as linguistic range. Thus, in addition to approaches that highlight influence, borrowings, or acculturation, the volume represents those that highlight syncretism, the material conditions of Jewish life, and comparatist perspectives.

Unthinking Eurocentrism

Unthinking Eurocentrism
Author: Ella Shohat
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2014-06-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317675401

Unthinking Eurocentrism, a seminal and award-winning work in postcolonial studies first published in 1994, explored Eurocentrism as an interlocking network of buried premises, embedded narratives, and submerged tropes that constituted a broadly shared epistemology. Within a transdisciplinary study, the authors argued that the debates about Eurocentrism and post/coloniality must be considered within a broad historical sweep that goes at least as far back as the various 1492s – the Inquisition, the Expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Conquest of the Americas, and the Transatlantic slave trade – a process which culminates in the post-War attempts to radically decolonize global culture. Ranging over multiple geographies, the book deprovincialized media/cultural studies through a "polycentric" approach, while analysing in depth such issues as postcolonial hybridity, antinomies of Enlightenment, the tropes of empire, gender and rescue fantasies, the racial politics of casting, and the limitations of "positive image" analysis. The substantial new afterword in this 20th anniversary new edition brings these issues into the present by charting recent transformations of the intellectual debates, as terms such as the "transnational," the "commons," "indigeneity," and the "Red Atlantic" have come to the fore. The afterword also explores some cinematic trends such as "indigenous media" and "postcolonial adaptations" that have gained strength over the past two decades, along with others, such as Nollywood, that have emerged with startling force. Winner of the Katherine Kovacs Singer Best Film Book Award, the book has been translated in full or in its entirety into diverse languages from Spanish to Farsi. This expanded edition of a ground-breaking text proposes analytical grids relevant to a wide variety of fields including postcolonial studies, literary studies, anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, and critical race studies.

Shaping a Modern Ethics

Shaping a Modern Ethics
Author: Benjamin Bennett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2020-02-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350122874

Is there any such thing as a single ethical system to which all human beings could conceivably subscribe? The short answer is no; and most people, being tolerant, would probably agree with this answer. Yet most people, precisely in being tolerant, also subscribe to an idea of “human rights” which presupposes just such a universal ethics. This basic question of ethics is similarly treacherous when approached on a higher technical level. Specialists have long recognized that Kant's categorical imperative is neither theoretically nor practically tenable. But efforts to revive and repair the Kantian project-including especially the monumental work of Jürgen Habermas-have all themselves been theoretically questionable, while developing a complexity that makes them impractical. Must we then simply do without ethics in the sense of a universal ethical method? By way of a close study of literary and philosophical texts, from Freud to Machiavelli, Benjamin Bennett shows why the failure of a universal or propositional ethics is indeed unavoidable. He uncovers a modern non-propositional ethics that cannot be grasped in a single theoretical move but can only be approached as a collection of instances of a modern ethical “we”, three key examples of which Bennett explores in this book: - The “we” of irony, whose speakers share a strictly preter-verbal knowledge which is concealed in their actual utterances - The insistent exclusive “we” of a group that has neither its own physical locality nor even a clear intellectual identity, comparable to the “we” of Jews in the diaspora - The “we” of feminism, a separate “we” from that embracing people who happen to have been born women.

Nollywood Stars

Nollywood Stars
Author: Noah A. Tsika
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2015-04-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0253015804

“A revelation. It will introduce readers to one of the most significant global centers of film production, Nigeria . . . an important work . . . Essential.” —Choice In this comprehensive study of Nollywood stardom around the world, Noah A. Tsika explores how the industry’s top on-screen talents have helped Nollywood to expand beyond West Africa and into the diaspora to become one of the globe’s most prolific and diverse media producers. Carrying VHS tapes and DVDs onto airplanes and publicizing new methods of film distribution, the stars are active agents in the global circulation of Nollywood film. From Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde’s cameo role on VH1’s popular series Hit the Floor to Oge Okoye’s startling impersonation of Lady Gaga, this book follows Nollywood stars from Lagos to London, Ouagadougou, Cannes, Paris, Porto-Novo, Sekondi-Takoradi, Dakar, Accra, Atlanta, Houston, New York, and Los Angeles. Tsika tracks their efforts to integrate into various entertainment cultures, but never to the point of effacing their African roots. “Tsika breaks new ground in showing that Nollywood stars are not the passive creations of an industry, but rather have been essential conditions of its existence and phenomenal success.” —Jacquelyn Southern, Center for Urban & Global Studies, Trinity College “There is no doubt that this is a pioneering book, one that raises important questions about the transnational and transmedial dimensions of an emergent, corporate culture of stardom and models an entirely new approach to the study of African movies and media.” —African Studies Review “Makes a convincing case that one cannot fully understand Nollywood without a thorough and rigorous examination of its stars.” —Christina Lane, University of Miami