Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel

Chapter Two. The Cinematic Construction of Mizrahi Identity

49 two The Cinematic Construction of Mizrahi Identity What is the nature of this “profound research” which drives the new forms of visual and cinematic representation? Is it only a matter of unearthing that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden continuities it suppressed? Or is a quite different practice entailed—not the rediscovery but the production of identity. Not the identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past? Stuart Hall1 Culture and Identity: Beyond the Essentialist/Constructionist Dyad Postcolonial and feminist scholars have shown us that the terms of the essentialist/constructionist dyad need to be understood within specific historical contexts and that, by attending to the multifaceted and conjectural nature of each term, the putative binary opposition between essentialist and constructivist stands loses its sway;2 in Diana Fuss’s (1989) articulation , “essentialism subtends the very idea of constructionism” (5). For these scholars, when confronted with bifurcating formulations, one should inquire why they are employed, what values are attached to them, and what their impacts are.3 In the binary essentialism versus constructivism rendering, a constructivist position is thought to prompt a definition of identity as a social construct predicated on values, norms, consciousness , and choice, whereas an essentialist stance on identity would focus 50 • Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel on ethnic/racial origins and on biologism. In the context of the Mizrahi film, constructivist positions often accentuate a postmodern performative play on identities4 to cast them as porous, fluid, and interchangeable with those of other ethnic groups. To accomplish that, these films often elide the Mizrahi past in the Arab/Muslim world as well as the immigration to Israel as they are more engaged in rhizomic relations (à la Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) rather than in historical and cultural roots. Conversely, an essentialist position in Mizrahi cinema would underline the provenance of a film’s characters, actors, and director, and the narratives would accentuate ethnic origins. Indeed, the extrafilmic discourse about Mizrahiness, such as in film reviews and scholarly critiques, often oscillates between those two positions. As we have seen, Mizrahiness was formed in Israel by the government administration that coined “ʿadot ha-Mizraḥ” (again, a term that connotes plurality and dispersion and emphasizes provenance). Later on, “Mizrahi” has become a self-designated identity appellation that implies some cohesion and a sense of belonging , and is meant to accentuate shared experiences and traditions, and, in the case of the “new Mizrahim,” even common sociopolitical sensibilities and an emerging Mizrahi consciousness. It is clear then that in the Mizrahi case, even the identity marker defies unequivocal articulations of Mizrahi identity as predicated solely either on this collective’s origins in the Arab/Muslim world or on an invented construct. Culture, as I choose to conceptualize it, provides us with a further challenge to the dichotomous distinctions between “essentialism” or “biologism,” on the one hand, and “constructivism” or “performance of identity,” on the other. I employ an open and inclusive definition of culture precisely in order to avoid what Aleksandra Ålund (1995) deems the dangerous trend of the “culturalisation of social disparities” (317) or the “representing [of] ethnic relations exclusively in terms of culture” (315).5 But instead of appending or subordinating culture to social struggle as Ålund might have it, I heed her cautionary note by broadening what is signified under “culture”; throughout this work, “cultural” will be contextualized by analyzing its socioeconomic, political, and ethnic dimensions. This inclusive rendering of culture as a lived experience concurs with Stuart Hall’s (1990: 226–27) formulation of cultural identities ; once we avoid essentialist definitions of culture, we may attend to its fluid and evolving nature while still asserting some continuity, relative stability, and intraethnic commonalities. My analysis here, and particularly its foregrounding of the Arab-Jew, will reveal the complex forces The Cinematic Construction of Mizrahi Identity • 51 that are interwoven into the intricate tapestry in the formation of collective cultural identities in Mizrahi cinema. Similarly to Hall’s above-mentioned assertion, Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav (2003, 2006) eschews notions of Mizrahiness as a stable definition/identity, a position stemming from the belief that Mizrahim, or for that matter, people of any ethnic group, have innate qualities they all share. Shenhav is equally dismissive of the opposite approach for its suggestion that Mizrahiness is strictly an imagined social construct, a position...