Suchergebnisse

Of a land called Amerka, Or how ammo Hanna was saved by al-Khadr -- Of the hallowed ridge, Or how Jubrail learned to profit from Christmas -- Of Jubrail's forebears, Or the toils of Yousef and Rosa -- In which Bethlehem gets a new street -- Of unruly markets and underwater ships -- Of sunken eyes in a casket, Or how Bethlehem came to be covered in dust -- Of mechanical wonders on near and distant shores -- In search of Amerka -- Of troubles on the Trocadero -- Of the decline of Hosh Dabdoub, Or how Jubrail's schooling came in useful -- Of a street named Rosario -- By the truth of al-Khadr, I went and came back! -- Of white cities and bronze medals -- Of fertility potions and the dizzying heights of success -- Of weeping icons, ghostly armies and visions of the Virgin -- Of the enchanted palaces of Bethlehem -- Of hyenas, serpents and French philanthropists -- Of the resurrection of Jubrail Dabdoub.

This article examines the figure of the returning émigré in late Ottoman and early Mandate Palestine. The wave of Palestinians who emigrated in the pre-World War I period did not, for the most part, intend to settle abroad permanently. Hailing largely from small towns and villages in the Palestinian hilly interior, they moved in and out of the Middle East with great regularity and tended to reinvest their money and social capital in their place of origin. The article argues that these emigrants constituted a previously undocumented segment of Palestinian society, the nouveaux riches who challenged the older elites from larger towns and cities in both social and economic terms. The discussion focuses in particular on their creation of new forms of bourgeois culture and the disruptive impact this had on gender and family relations, complicating the assumption that middle-class modernity in Palestine was largely effected by external actors.