This essay examines the paradoxical effects on Arab Jews of their two, rival essentialist nationalisms-Jewish and Arab. It shows how the Eurocentric concept of a single "Jewish History" cut non-Ashkenazi Jews off from their origins, even while the Zionist idea that Arabness and Jewishness are mutually exclusive gradually came to be shared by Arab nationalist discourse. The emergence of a new, hybrid identity of Mizrahim, as a product both of Israel's assimilationist policy and of resistance to it, is discussed. Finally, the author proposes an interdisciplinary framework-Mizrahi studies-as a way of going beyond hegemonic Zionist discourses while at the same time making a strong link to the Palestinian issue.
Der Beitrag untersucht das nationale israelische Modernisierungsprojekt im Hinblick auf sephardische Juden/Jüdinnen oder Mizrahim, also Juden afrikanischer oder asiatischer Herkunft. Der herrschende Diskurs israelitischer Politiker und Wissenschaftler unterstellt, daß diese Juden aus "primitiven", "rückständigen", "unterentwickelten" oder "vormodernen" Gesellschaften kommen und somit modernisiert werden müssen. Diese Ideologie führte dazu, daß Mizrahim an den Staatsgrenzen angesiedelt und Rehabilitierungsprojekten zugeteilt wurden: "Dieser Diskurs und diese Politik hatten verheerende Folgen für die Mizrahim." Es wird ausgeführt, daß dieses "Modernisierungsprojekt" laufend die Unterentwicklung der Mizrahim reproduziert. Obwohl der Zionismus Sephardim und Ashkenazim als ein einziges Volk zusammenfaßt, haben die sephardischen Eigenheiten gleichzeitig den Anspruch der Zionisten erschüttert, ein einziges jüdisches Volk zu vertreten, das sich nicht nur über eine gemeinsame Religion, sondern auch über eine gemeinsame Nationalität definiert. (pra)
At a time when the grand recits of the West have been told and retold ad infinitum, when a certain postmodernism (Lyotard) speaks of "end" to metanarratives, and when Fukayama speaks of an "end of history," we must ask: precisely whose narrative and whose history is being declared at an "end?"
"Unthinking Eurocentrism, a seminal and award-winning work in postcolonial studies first published in 1994, explored Eurocentrism as an interlocking network of buried premises, embedded narratives, and submerged tropes that constituted a broadly shared epistemology. Within a transdisciplinary study, the authors argued that the debates about Eurocentrism and post/coloniality must be considered within a broad historical sweep that goes at least as far back as the various 1492s: the Inquisition, the Expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Conquest of the Americas, and the Transatlantic slave trade; a process which culminates in the post War attempts to radically decolonize global culture. Ranging over multiple geographies, the book deprovincialized media/cultural studies through a polycentric approach, while analysing in depth such issues as postcolonial hybridity, antinomies of Enlightenment, the tropes of empire, gender and rescue fantasies, the racial politics of casting, and the limitations of positive image analysis. The substantial new afterword in this 20th anniversary new edition brings these issues into the present by charting recent transformations of the intellectual debates, as terms such as the transnational, the commons, indigeneity, and the Red Atlantic have come to the fore. The afterword also explores some cinematic trends such as indigenous media and postcolonial adaptations that have gained strength over the past two decades, along with others, such as Nollywood, that have emerged with startling force. Winner of the Katherine Kovacs Singer Best Film Book Award, the book has been translated in full or in its entirety into diverse languages from Spanish to Farsi. This expanded edition of a ground-breaking text proposes analytical grids relevant to a wide variety of fields including postcolonial studies, literary studies, anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, and critical race studies. "--
