Synopses & Reviews
This important volume rethinks the conventional parameters of Middle East studies through attention to popular cultural forms, producers, and communities of consumers. The volume has a broad historical scope, ranging from the late Ottoman period to the second Palestinian uprising, with a focus on cultural forms and processes in Israel, Palestine, and the refugee camps of the Arab Middle East. The contributors consider how Palestinian and Israeli popular culture influences and is influenced by political, economic, social, and historical processes in the region. At the same time, they follow the circulation of Palestinian and Israeli cultural commodities and imaginations across borders and checkpoints and within the global marketplace.
The volume is interdisciplinary, including the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, ethnomusicologists, and Americanist and literary studies scholars. Contributors examine popular music of the Palestinian resistance, ethno-racial andldquo;passingandrdquo; in Israeli cinema, Arab-Jewish rock, Euro-Israeli tourism to the Arab Middle East, Internet communities in the Palestinian diaspora, cafandeacute; culture in early-twentieth-century Jerusalem, and more. Together, they suggest new ways of conceptualizing Palestinian and Israeli political culture.
Contributors. Livia Alexander, Carol Bardenstein, Elliott Colla, Amy Horowitz, Laleh Khalili, Mary Layoun, Mark LeVine, Joseph Massad, Melani McAlister, Ilan Pappandeacute;, Rebecca L. Stein, Ted Swedenburg, Salim Tamari
Review
andldquo;This empirically rich, theoretically innovative, and unusually wide-ranging volume brings together a set of fascinating and insightful explorations of the popular culture and cultural politics of Palestine/Israel, including music, cinema, television, cyberculture, tourism, comics, and the role of Israel and the Jews in U. S. evangelical Christian eschatology. By demonstrating how culture has been a crucial and often formative domain of contention both within and between Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine over the past century and down to the present day, the contributors open up a great deal of extremely valuable terrain that has been sorely neglected until now.andrdquo;andmdash;Zachary Lockman, author of Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism
Review
andldquo;Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburgandrsquo;s volume Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture makes an invaluable contribution to the growing field of Middle Eastern cultural studies. Refusing essentialist understandings of culture, the editors and authors also transcend traditional Marxist paradigms. The volume insightfully illuminates the often marginalized issue of the politics of culture within the contested terrain of Palestine and Israel.andrdquo;andmdash;Ella Shohat, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Cultural Studies, New York University
Review
andldquo;This theoretically savvy, eye-opening tour through popular culture in and about Palestine and Israel confirms at once the inherent inseparability of culture/politics and the gripping mutuality of Israel/Palestine.andrdquo;andmdash;Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt
Review
andquot;[P]rovocative. . . . [T]he essays in this volume . . . imaginatively deconstruct aspects of popular culture still seeping across the walls erected through this long and intractable conflict.andquot;
Synopsis
An examination of how popular culture is received and produced within the Middle East.
About the Author
Rebecca L. Stein is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is a coeditor of The Struggle for Sovereignty in Palestine and Israel (forthcoming).
Ted Swedenburg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past and a coeditor of Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, also published by Duke University Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Popular Culture, Transnationality, and Radical History / Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg 1
I. Historical Articulations
Wasif Jawhariyyeh, Popular Music, and Early Modernity in Jerusalem / Salim Tamari 27
The Palestinian Press in Mandatory Jaffa: Advertising, Nationalism, and the Public Sphere / Mark LeVine 51
Post-Zionism and Its Popular Cultures / Ilan Pappandeacute; 77
II. Cinemas and Cyberspaces
Cross/Cast: Passing in Israeli and Palestinian Cinema / Carol Bardenstein 99
Virtual Nation: Palestinian Cyberculture in Lebanese Camps / Laleh Khalili 126
Is There a Palestinian National Cinema?: The National and Transnational in Palestinian Film Production / Livia Alexander 150
III. The Politics of Music
Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music / Joseph Massad 175
Dueling Nativities: Zehava Ben Sings Umm Kulthum / Amy Horowitz 202
Against Hybridity: The Case of Enrico Macias/Gaston Chrenassia / Ted Swedenburg 231
IV. Regional and Global Circuits
andquot;First Contactandquot; and Other Israeli Fictions: Tourism, Globalization, and the Middle East Peace Process / Rebecca L. Stein 259
Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular: The Left Behind Series and Christian Evangelicalism's New World Order / Melani McAlister 288
Telling Stories in Palestine: Comix Understanding and Narratives of Palestine-Israel / Mary Layoun 313
Sentimentality and Redemption: The Rhetoric of Egyptian Pop Culture Intifada Solidarity / Elliott Cola 338
Bibliography 365
Contributors 397
Index 401