Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (review)

Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices brings together twelve essays by Ella Shohat, the trailblazing Israeli-Arab-Jewish scholar of postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies, whose key interventions in the intellectual debates around national discourse, hyphenated identities, feminist theory, and postcolonialism have opened up new analytic vistas in interdisciplinary scholarship.

Eleven of the twelve essays in this collection have been previously published, the earliest dating from 1985 (“The Cinema after Babel”), while the most recent, “The ‘Postcolonial’ in Translation: Reading Edward Said between English and Hebrew,” was published in 2004. Only one of the essays is new, “Post-Fanon and the Colonial: A Situational Diagnosis.” Yet the selection does not follow a chronological trajectory, nor does it necessarily compile Shohat’s most widely read essays. Rather, it is representative of various fields of study where her trademark transgression of disciplinary boundaries has created new paradigms of analysis, enabling a complex questioning and understanding of Eurocentric and phallocentric epistemologies and the “hierarchical ordering of disciplines and knowledge.”

Thus the first essay in the collection, “Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge: Area Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies” (first published in 2001), sets the tone for this decidedly “undisciplined” book. “Gendered Cartographies” shows Shohat’s questioning of the geographical categories of analyses that look at “Middle Eastern women” or “South American gays,” for example, as cohesive and self-contained categories of analysis, and argues that “only a multiperspectival approach can capture the movement of feminist ideas across borders.”

Other essays that reveal Shohat’s conscious breaching of the constraints of disciplinary boundaries include “Gender and the Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema,” “Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies of Adaptation,” “Disorienting Cleopatra: A Modern Trope of Identity,” “Notes on the ‘Postcolonial’,” “Post-Fanon and the Colonial: A Situational Diagnosis,” “Post-Third Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema,” and “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews.”

I particularly enjoyed “‘Lasers for Ladies’: Endo Discourse and the Inscriptions of Science,” where Shohat explores the empowerment of women through collective viewing, in a supportive community setting, of medical imaging of the otherwise invisible and pathologized interior female body.

Another fearlessly iconoclastic essay is the one that inspires the title of the collection, namely “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews.” This essay (like “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews”) provides a powerful elucidation of the anomalies of the hegemonic Zionist national ideology, which forcefully erases the cultural identity of Arab Jews in order to create an artificially homogeneous and exclusivist discourse of anti-Semitic oppression, which would normalize all Jewish experiences based on Europe’s long record of anti-Semitism. Yet that is clearly not the experience of Arab Jews who, unlike European Jews, did not endure cyclical attacks and pogroms over the millennia during which they cohabitated with Arabs of other religions, and who lived their Arab Jewish identity as one of wholeness rather than fragmentation—until the creation of “the Jewish state.” And Jews and non-Jews alike, in various parts of the world (e.g. Muslims and Jews in Spain during the Inquisition, non-Catholics in Central America during the Spanish Conquest), have had similar experiences of purging and forced conversions.

The concluding essay, “The ‘Postcolonial’ in Translation: Reading Edward Said between English and Hebrew,” written in honor of the late Said and first published in 2004, analyzes key moments in the translation, reception, interpretation, and frequent misrepresentation of Said’s thoughts, as his books became available in Hebrew. Zionist academics have misrepresented Said, Shohat explains, attributing to him the binary mindset that he shatters in his work. Others have conveniently moved “beyond Said,” she argues, without ever having actually engaged with his thought. Similarly, eagerly jumping on the “post” wagon, numerous left-liberal Israeli writers and academics have evaded all critical analysis of the colonial nature of Israel, so as to push beyond colonialism, beyond Zionism, into a decontextualized and guilt-free “post-Zionist” sphere that...