Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat’s work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat’s work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time.
As a renowned academic, orator, and activist, Shohat’s work unpacks complexly fraught issues: anomalies of the national and colonial in Zionist discourse; narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; links and distinctions between the expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 war and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew; and efforts to imagine a possible united and peaceful future. Shohat’s trans-disciplinary perspective illuminates the contemporary cultural politics in and around the Middle East. A transdisciplinary work engaging history, literature, sociology, film, media, and cultural studies, Selected Writings offers a vivid sense of Shohat’s unique intellectual journey and field-defining career.