Ella Habiba Shohat is een professor in culturele studies wiens werk Eurocentrisme en Orientalisme kritisch onderzoekt vanuit postkoloniaal en transnationaal perspectief. Ze heeft belangrijke benaderingen ontwikkeld voor de studie van Arabische Joden in de context van Israël en Palestina. Shohat, die zichzelf definieert als een Arabische Joodse, wordt gewaardeerd om de diepgang en originaliteit van haar analyses. Haar invloedrijke essays en studies zetten aan tot nadenken over culturele identiteit en historische verhalen.
Focusing on the concept of Eurocentrism, this influential work in postcolonial studies examines how hidden assumptions and narratives shape a collective understanding within popular culture, film, and mass media. By dissecting these interwoven elements, the book reveals the pervasive epistemology that underlies societal perceptions and cultural representations, making it a critical resource for understanding the dynamics of power and knowledge in a postcolonial context.
Exploring the intricacies of patriotism, this book delves into its multifaceted identity rather than simply accepting or rejecting it. It encourages readers to engage with the nuanced meanings and implications of being patriotic, fostering a deeper understanding of its complexities in contemporary society.
Spanning several decades, Ella Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East, focusing on the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew. This book gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs. as well as previously unpublished material. Defying the binarist and Eurocentric Arab-versus-Jew rendering of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Shohat's work has dared to engage with the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism and nationalism. Shohat's paradigm-shifting work unpacks such fraught issues as the anomalies of the national/colonial in Zionist discourse; the narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; the links and distinctions between the dispossession of the Nakba and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; the traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; the echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of 'the Jew'; and the efforts to imagine a possible future inter-communal 'convivencia'. Shohat's transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author's intellectual journey.