GENDER RACE AND NATION IN ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN CINEMA

Programma

ELLA HABIBA SHOHAT

FRAMING THE COLONIAL PRESENT. GENDER RACE AND NATION IN ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN CINEMA

MENARG KEYNOTE LECTURE SERIES

GENT > 27/04 APRIL 2012 > 16H00-18H00 | GHENT UNIVERSITY FILM-PLATEAU, PADDENHOEK, 3

GRATIS | SEATS ARE LIMITED, PLEASE BOOK IN ADVANCE! > EOP.MENARG@GMAIL.COM

In this year's edition of the Eye on Palestine Keynote Lecture Series, leading scholar Ella Shohat explores Israeli Cinema as a productive site of national culture, dating back to the early Zionist films about turn-of-the-century Palestine. The lecture, based on the new edition of her book "Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation", offers a deconstructionist reading of Zionism – a movement emerging simultaneously with the invention of cinema – viewing the cinema as itself participating in the ‘invention’ of the nation. Unthinking the Eurocentric imaginary of ‘East versus West’, Ella Shohat addresses the paradoxes of an anomalous national/colonial project through a number of salient issues: the ambivalence toward the geographies of both ‘East’ and ‘West’; the Sabra figure as a negation of the ‘Diaspora Jew’; the iconography of the land of Israel as a denial of Palestine; the narrative role of ‘the good Arab’ and the limits of ‘positive image’ analysis; and the oxymoronic place allotted to Arab-Jews/Mizrahim within an orientalist historical and social discourse. In addition the lecture examines the emergence of richly multiperspectival cultural practices that transcend earlier dichotomies through a palimpsestic and cross-border approach to Israel/Palestine. It looks at the inscription of the Arab-Jewish memory of Muslim spaces, while also reflecting on the Palestinian narration of the Nakba within a revisionist cinema that actively constructs an audio-visual archive. Shohat transnationalizes the discussion of ‘national culture’ not only by including Palestinian films produced within Israel but also by addressing diasporic films that treat the contested geography of Israel/Palestine.

The MENARG Keynote Lecture Series is part of the Eye on Palestine film festival and is organized by the Middle East and North Africa Research Group (MENARG) at Ghent University. All lectures are open to the public.

Bios

Ella Habiba Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern studies at New York University. Since the 1980s, she has lectured and written extensively on Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Postcolonialism, transnationalism, and diasporic cultures.  In particular, her work focuses on Orientalism in American popular culture, analogies between the representation of Arabs in Hollywood  and in Israeli cinema, links between images of Native Americans and Palestinians on the one hand, and Blacks and Arab-Jews/Mizrahim on the other.  Her books include: Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (2006);  Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (1998);  and with Robert Stam,  Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994); Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (2003); Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (2007); and Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (forthcoming, 2012). 

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