Suchergebnisse

Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: "Is This America?" -- New Orleans and the Death Drive -- On Ruins, Redemption, and a Post-American World -- Overview -- Part I: American Time -- 1. New Orleans and Empire: Legacies from the "Age of Revolution" -- Bounding Empire: "Homeland" and the Transnational Prison-Industrial Complex -- New Orleans, 2005 -- Port-au-Prince, 2010 -- Writing Revolution -- Conclusion: A Caribbean City? -- 2. New Orleans and Americanization: "Progress," "Decline," and Tourism in the Twentieth Century -- From Nouvelle Orleans to "The City that Care Forgot" -- "America's Most Romantic City": Selling Slavery, Erasing Race -- "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?": Tourism and Culture after Katrina -- Conclusion: Walking in New Orleans -- Part II: Katrina Time -- 3. Documenting Katrina: The Return of the "Real" -- "Not as Seen on TV" -- Trouble the Water as "Cruel Optimism" -- Land of Opportunity and the "Affect Economy" -- Conclusion: Documenting Katrina Time -- 4. Resisting Katrina: The Right to Return -- Right to Housing -- Right to Education -- Right to the City -- Conclusion: Public Time -- Part III: New Orleans Time -- 5. New Orleans and Water: Remapping Ecologies of the Gulf South -- Conquering Water: The Struggle for New Orleans -- Conceding to Water: The Struggle for the Lower Ninth Ward -- Between Land and Water: Louisiana's Retreating Frontier -- Conclusion: Slow Time? -- 6. New Orleans and the Nation: Legacies from the Future -- Dead Cities -- The Exceptional City -- The Liquid City -- Conclusion: Beyond America -- Notes -- Select Bibliography -- Index

This paper takes as its starting point Edward Said's distinction between 'religious' and 'secular' modes of cultural affiliation. As these simultaneously diverging and converging modes also trammel the particular grounds of thinking that have been Said's natural target of criticism - Zionism - his work speaks particularly powerfully to the debate surrounding the religious genealogy of Jewish identity. This paper argues that Said's interventions on Zionism highlight as problematic the position whereby the 'Ingathering of the Exiles' is promoted as coexisting with a 'diasporic consciousness' nurtured by Judaism during exile; messianic hopes of religious Jews cannot be reconciled with physical return to the Promised Land; identity circumscribed by ethnicity and place cannot stand in as exemplary for the exiled, unsettled and ultimately homeless identity trumpeted by discourses of the 'post', as many contemporary theorists would have it. And yet through an exploration of the writings of David Grossman, whose construction of Jewish identity is envisaged through the regulating, competing and collaborating tropes of Zionism and Diaspora, I argue that this position is crucial for the elaboration of Israeli identity. I also argue that in fact there is room within Said's thinking both for the anti-essentialist elaboration of 'homeless' identities as well as 'the permission to narrate' an identity politics, and that his own distinction between the 'secular' and the 'religious' begins to disassemble. I explore this blurring of the sacred and the secular through the prism of Exodus - as both concept and narrative. This paper suggests that it is precisely Said's achievement to embody these tensions between religion and its other, divine providence and human agency, historical materialism and postmodernism, alienation and its perennially tempting opposite: home.

This paper takes as its starting point Edward Said's distinction between 'religious' and 'secular' modes of cultural affiliation. As these simultaneously diverging and converging modes also trammel the particular grounds of thinking that have been Said's natural target of criticism - Zionism - his work speaks particularly powerfully to the debate surrounding the religious genealogy of Jewish identity. This paper argues that Said's interventions on Zionism highlight as problematic the position whereby the 'Ingathering of the Exiles' is promoted as coexisting with a 'diasporic consciousness' nurtured by Judaism during exile; messianic hopes of religious Jews cannot be reconciled with physical return to the Promised Land; identity circumscribed by ethnicity and place cannot stand in as exemplary for the exiled, unsettled and ultimately homeless identity trumpeted by discourses of the 'post', as many contemporary theorists would have it. And yet through an exploration of the writings of David Grossman, whose construction of Jewish identity is envisaged through the regulating, competing and collaborating tropes of Zionism and Diaspora, I argue that this position is crucial for the elaboration of Israeli identity. I also argue that in fact there is room within Said's thinking both for the anti-essentialist elaboration of 'homeless' identities as well as 'the permission to narrate' an identity politics, and that his own distinction between the 'secular' and the 'religious' begins to disassemble. I explore this blurring of the sacred and the secular through the prism of Exodus - as both concept and narrative. This paper suggests that it is precisely Said's achievement to embody these tensions between religion and its other, divine providence and human agency, historical materialism and postmodernism, alienation and its perennially tempting opposite: home.