Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices

433 Pages·2006·2.32 MB·English

by  Ella Shohat

Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices
NEXT WAVE
New Directions in Women’s Studies
A series edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan,
and Robyn Wiegman

Ella Shohat
TABOO MEMORIES,
DIASPORIC VOICES
Duke University Press Durham and London 2006
∫ 2006 Ella Shohat
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $
Designed by C.H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Scala with Univers display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
appear on the last printed page of this book.
Acknowledgments for previously printed material and credits for
illustrations appear at the end of this book.
para Robert, ‘yuni

Illustrations ix
Preface xiii
Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge:
Area Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies 1
Gender and the Culture of Empire:
Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema 17
Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies of Adaptation 70
The Cinema after Babel:
Language, Di√erence, Power (with Robert Stam) 106
‘‘Lasers for Ladies’’:
Endo Discourse and the Inscriptions of Science 139
Disorienting Cleopatra: A Modern Trope of Identity 166
CONTENTS
Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions:
Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews 201
Notes on the ‘‘Post-Colonial’’ 233
Post-Fanon and the Colonial: A Situational Diagnosis 250
Post–Third Worldist Culture:
Gender, Nation, and the Cinema 290
Rupture and Return:
Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews 330
The ‘‘Postcolonial’’ in Translation:
Reading Edward Said between English and Hebrew 359
Index 385

1 The Promethean masternarrative: Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe 20
2 Between virginity and cannibalism: ‘‘America’’ 20
3 Counternarrative to ‘‘discovery discourse’’ 22
4 The pornographic intertext of travel literature: Babylon
in Intolerance 23
5 Terra Incognita or the power to name: A map of
America 28
6 Map as a document of possession: King Solomon’s
Mines 28
7 Global ubiquity: Around the World in 80 Days 30
8 Penetrating the ‘‘last frontier’’: A Trip to the Moon 30
9 The West rescues the Egyptian past from oblivion 34
10 Amplifying the voices on the margins of Egyptology:
Al-Mumia 37
11 Sheltered in the tropics: Gender and ambivalence 40
12 National (white) fantasies from The Birth of a Nation 44
13 The imperial path to the couple: Road to Morocco 45 ILLUSTRATIONS
14 Fertility goddess: Carmen Miranda in The Gang’s All
Here 48
15 Erotic animalization: Josephine Baker in Zou Zou 48
16 Entering the inaccessible harem: Harum Scarum 52
17 The interracial homoerotic subtext: Lawrence of
Arabia 58
18 The desert as the site of the sexual imaginary:
The Sheik 58
19 Gender transgressions in the Oriental desert:
Brooke Shields, Sahara 59
20 Imitating mimesis in Istanbul: National Geographic
magazine 81
21 Breaking the Ten Commandments: History of the World,
Part I 85
22 The Prophet Muhammad’s disembodied gaze:
The Message 90
23 Casting a black God: ‘‘De Lawd’’ in The Green
Pastures 93