Ella Shohat

Area Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowledge

Soon after September 11, the media resumed their habitual attack on “liberals,” “progressives,” “antiwar radicals,” “unpatriotic leftists,” and “politically correct multiculturalists.” This time, Ground Zero was presented as evidence in the war not simply against terrorism but also against “PC multiculturalism.” The advocates of “postmodernist cultural relativism,” it was suggested, would have to admit their defeat in the Culture Wars. Islamic fundamentalism, Talibanism, bin Ladenism and, of course, the oppression of women, were now to be seen as documents of the barbarism of non-Western civilizations. Essentialist theses of the kind produced by Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis again occupied center stage, reenacting the consoling and narcissistic narrative of an ancient civilizational war now reaching our own megalopolis. Henceforth, the demise of the multicultural Left requires no further proof. Case closed. Yet Manichean narratives and Enlightenment binarisms have also haunted coalitionary work along the whole spectrum of the Left, particularly when issues of multiculturalism and feminism have been at stake. The postmodern abandonment of the Universal has continued to produce anxieties about how to defend women’s and gay/lesbian rights given the global plurality of cultures, at times triggering a full return to the false dichotomy of modernity versus tradition. Written in the spring of 2000, this lecture is included in the 911 special issue of Social Text in the hopes of engaging a more complex discussion about gender, race, and cultural difference in the context of violent transnational conflicts. Despite its traumatic magnitude, September 11 is neither the end of history nor its beginning. The multiculturalist/transnationalist feminist critique of the production of knowledge developed over the past decade has not lost its relevance; rather, it has gained renewed urgency. When feminism is invoked in academic institutions outside of “Western” spaces, it is often subjected to an (inter)disciplinary order that anxiously and politely sends it “back” to the kingdom of area studies. There the experts of the day, it is assumed, will tell us about the plight of women; each outlandish geographical zone will be matched with an abused bodily part. A doubly exclusionary logic (that which applies to women and to their geography) will quickly allot a discursive space for women as well as

Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab Jews

for the representation of the history and identity of Arab Jews/Mizrahim (that is, Jews from Arab/Muslim regions) vis-à-vis the question of Palestine. In previous publications I suggested some of the historical, political, economic, and discursive links between the question of Palestine and Arab Jews, and argued for a scholarship that investigates the erasure of such links. Here, I will trace some moments in the hegemonic production of an isolationist approach to the study of “Jewish History” as crucial to a quite anomalous project in which the state created the nation—not simply in the metaphorical sense of fabrication, but also in the literal sense of engineering the transplant of populations from all over the world. New modes of knowledge about Jews were essential in this enterprise, which placed Palestinians and European Zionist Jews at opposite poles of the civilizational clash. Yet, Arab Jews presented some challenges for Zionist scholarship, precisely because their presence “messed up” its Enlightenment paradigm that had already figured the modern Jew as cleansed from its shtetl past. In Palestine, freed of its progenitor the Ostjuden, the New Jew could paradoxically live in the “East” without being of it. Central to Zionist thinking was the concept of Kibbutz Galuiot—the “ingathering of the exiles.” Following two millennia of homelessness and living presumably “outside of history,” Jews could once again “enter history” as subjects, as “normal” actors on the world stage by returning to their ancient birth place, Eretz Israel. In this way, Jews were thought to heal a deformative rupture produced by exilic existence. This transformation of Migola le’Geula—from diaspora to redemption—offered a teleological reading of Jewish History in which Zionism formed a redemptive vehicle for the renewal of Jewish life on a demarcated terrain, no longer simply spiritual and textual but rather national and political. The idea of Jewish return (which after the establishment of Israel was translated into legal language handing every Jew immediate access to Israeli citizenship) had been intertwined with the imaging of the empty land of Palestine. Its indigenous inhabitants could be bracketed or, alternately, portrayed as intruders deemed to “return” to their Arab land of origins (a discourse that was encoded in the various transfer plans). A corollary of the notion of Jewish “return” and continuity in Israel Ella Shohat Rupture and Return

The Media's War

From the very inception of the Gulf Crisis, the dominant US media failed to fulfil the role of independent journalism. Instead it acted as public relations for the State Department, assimilating the language, terminology, and the assumptions of the administration, thereby undermining any critical perspectives upon the conduct of the war. Any attempt to discuss the medias coverage of the Gulf War must examine some of the ways in which it structured identification with the Pentagons agenda, and the interests of an international elite.

Whence and Whither Postcolonial Theory

The Stam/Shohat essay addresses the “whence” and the “whither” of postcolonial critique. In their dialogue with the Young and Chakravarty essays, they argue for a decentered multidirectional narrative for the circulation of ideas. Tracing the issues raised by postcolonial critique back to “the various 1492s”—the Reconquista, the Inquisition, the Edicts of Expulsion, and the Conquista of the “new” world—they argue that postcolonial theory has multiple beginnings, locations, and trajectories. The “encounter” between Europe and the indigene provoked a salutary epistemological crisis in Europe. “indigeneity,” they argue, troubles some of the basic axioms of postcolonial theory, while also opening up new horizons of the politically possible. By posing probing questions about culture, property, power, energy, wealth, and equality, indigenous people and their non-indigenous interlocutors have challenged the assumptions of modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.

Imperialism and the Fantasies of Democracy

This essay is taken from a book that criticizes the abuse of the concept of patriotism by the American right wing. At the same time it engages polemically with anti-Americans, whether rightists or leftists. Present-day tensions, the essay argues, must be seen against the backdrop of the much longer history of not only colonialism and imperialism but various national mythologies. At times, we argue, “anti-Americanism” is a completely rational response to specific offenses by the U.S. government or by U.S.–led transnational corporations; yet at other times legitimate critique becomes mingled with blind obsessions, paranoid projections, and even defensive guilt. Examining abuses of the concept of patriotism, the work focuses on various national mythologies and exceptionalisms, and on myriad forms of patriotism, in terms of the following questions: What are the long-term historical sources and current manifestations of love and hate, pride and anger, in patriotic nationalism? How did patriotism in the United States become so thoroughly militarized? How do rival conceptions of patriotism interact and interpenetrate across national boundaries? How did we arrive at this point of crisis? How have countries such as Brazil, France, and the United States tended to imagine one another, and for what historical reasons, and what has changed in the present? What is the role of narcissism both in American superpatriotism and in anti-Americanism?

Introduction: 911--A Public Emergency?

featured, among the nods to Utah Native Americans and culturally diverse musicians, a U.S. flag disinterred from the carnage of the World Trade Center. The cause of some initial discomfort to officials of the International Olympic Committee, the wounded flag did make it to the February 8 event, carried into the stadium before a hushed crowd of 55,000. Too fragile to fly, this new symbol of global unity bore the hurt of all civilized nations. Yielded from the ground of ontological innocence, a space of victims and heroes, the flag arose phoenixlike from the ashes. Such are the conditions under which the catastrophe—encoded most simply as 911— has continued to circulate. The Olympic episode would stand as a banner for international cooperation, even as one nation exercised a supreme unilateralism that was reconciled with calls for infinite retribution. From Ground Zero, a new era dawned as the flag moved from the fallen global pinnacle to the world’s level playing field. Henceforth, it was presumed, everything would be different. Whatever was building before that day— especially doubt at the fairness at the world’s field—would have to be forgotten. For those of a critical disposition, the urgency would seem to be to remind the public of those other times, of those prior issues that remain. So, the Dickensian terms of 911 have emerged: the best of times, the worst of times; everything has changed, nothing has changed. Whatever the bleak remnants of 911, it continues to stand as a Manichean frame of allor-nothing that can only wreak havoc on the Left, which is spurred to imagine its own conditions of public access as existing in a state of emergency. To accept that everything is now different invites amnesia but also manacles the future to official crisis management. Simple refusal of these declared new times is, at best, unnewsworthy, and at worst, self-anesthetizing to what it is now possible to say. The cult of the news that raises the specter of public access clashes with those very critical traditions that would ennoble the voices of opposition. The results are bound to be disorienting and self-censorious to radical intervention long after the dust has settled. Whatever historical and political economic analysis that can be brought to bear on the straitjacket of 911 as an event needs to be coupled with an unhinging of the conditions under which the Left intervenes. This special issue of Randy Martin and Ella Shohat Introduction

FRENCH INTELLECTUALS AND THE POSTCOLONIAL

This essay outlines the ‘structuring absence’ of postcolonial theory in dominant French discourse until quite recently, despite Frances position as a multiracial post-colonial society and despite the central role of French and francophone anticolonial thinkers in postcolonial and critical race thought. The essay outlines the absence of postcolonial thought, cultural studies, and critical race studies in French intellectual production through the 1990s, as well as the ironies of this absence, and also points to recent French writing that works to account for this absence and highlight the continuities between Frances colonial past and postcolonial present. The late 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, we argue, saw a burgeoning of scholarship on the part of French intellectuals who were committed to postcolonial critique. Especially after the 2005 rebellions in France, there emerged a growing scholarship – in the form of conferences, special issues of journals, co-edited volumes, collected works, anthologies and individual books – which was met with a series of critiques denying the connection between colonialism and the contemporary moment but which nonetheless generated a crucial and necessary intervention in French public life.

Introduction: Corruption in Corporate Culture

dals from a year earlier could easily have seemed a distant memory. In the context of an awesome war, corruption might have seemed a minor domestic affair no longer relevant to our “real” national concerns. Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, and ImClone could have been relegated to the arcane workings of business. Yet the question of corruption touches every fiber of contemporary sociopolitical life, linking “domestic” and “foreign” affairs in multiple ways. The war itself is haunted by hanging chads and a biased Supreme Court that helped select a president who has since dismissed numerous international agreements and institutions, including the major arena for global diplomacy, the United Nations. The model of corporate organizational structure and modus operandi informs the management of the United States, whose CEO seems eager to establish a global power monopoly that strips international institutions of the power to make multilateral decisions and redefines the role of these institutions as merely humanitarian. Two decades after the Reagan-Bush campaign to tear down the gains of the New Deal, the Bush-Cheney regime has fostered further deregulation, enabling predatory corporate behavior. George W.’s reign, like that of his father, has resumed this vision of governing in order to undo government as the realm “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Government is conceived as a means to protect the free flow of business from so-called interest groups—a phrase the administration and the dominant media now apply to independent organizations, such as unions and environmental groups, that defend social welfare. George W. Bush has conducted his presumed fight against corruption by focusing public attention on a few “bad apples.” Neoliberal efforts to rid the globe of corruption, such as that of the World Bank Governance and Anti-corruption Program, have tended to focus on Third World corruption embodied by greedy local kleptocrats. Meanwhile the bank’s officers of reform are free to come and go, demanding ransoms in the form of cuts to the social economy in exchange for further aid to business, demonstrating that discussion of corruption always requires a look at the very individuals and institutions designed to combat corruption, since they can easily become facilitators of its machinery. Randy Martin and Ella Shohat Introduction

Des-orientar Cleópatra: um tropo moderno da identidade

Este artigo propoe um estudo da representacao de Cleopatra ao longo do seculo passado, situando o debate sobre sua aparencia e origens no âmbito da dominacao colonial, das lutas anti-coloniais e das friccoes raciais pos-coloniais que, como se tenta mostrar, acrescenta uma outra dimensao para entender o investimento na identidade de Cleopatra.

Introduction: Palestine in a Transnational Context

2000, the policy making of the U.S. government has been haunted by the question of Palestine. The Intifada made briefly visible the consequences of Israel’s continued occupation and expanded colonization of the West Bank and Gaza, an expansion facilitated by the Oslo accords of 1993 and disguised under the name of “the peace process.” Within a year, however, the launching of the worldwide war on terror provided Washington with a new way to misrepresent the nature of Israel’s war against the Palestinians. A century-long history of dispossession, expulsion, occupation, and resistance was reduced, once again, to a series of Palestinian acts of terror. A people’s loss of their homes and homeland, of their freedom of movement and human dignity, of their personal security and political future, could instead be framed as a battle of civilization against terror, of democracy against hatred, of the West against Islam. Under the banner of the war on terror, the United States then announced its plans for a war against Iraq as the cornerstone of an unapologetic project to remake the political order of the Middle East. Yet the question of Palestine refused to disappear. From the protests of up to half a million people in several cities of Europe to the revived antiwar activism of the campuses of North American universities (see Vincent Lloyd and Zia Mian’s essay in this issue), an emergent peace movement in the West placed the issue of Palestinian rights, alongside the right of the Iraqi people to be spared the devastation of war, at the center of its politics. The importance attached to the Palestine question was a response to the obvious discrepancy between Washington’s use of U.N. Security Council resolutions against Iraq, its disregard for council resolutions against Israel, and its vetoing of any international intervention on behalf of the Palestinians. But the importance reflected something larger. The injustice against the Palestinians has always been carried out in the name of the West. Washington supports, funds, and arms many forms of injustice in the Middle East. But only in the case of Israel is the injustice disguised and defended as a moral struggle of the West against the rest. The Palestine question now haunts the West, much as the question of apartheid haunted a previous generation. We draw the analogy with apartheid not to make any simplistic historical comparison between Israel and South Timothy Mitchell, Gyan Prakash, and Ella Shohat Introduction