Suchergebnisse

How denial sustains the liberal imagination of a progressive and democratic Israel. The question that this book aims to answer might seem simple: how can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite--an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence of racism and human rights abuse, Israel has long been embraced by the most liberal sectors of European and American society as a manifestation of the progressive values of tolerance, plurality, inclusivity, and democracy, and hence a project that can be passionately defended for its lofty ideals. Tolerance Is a Wasteland argues that the key to this miraculous act of political alchemy is a very specific form of denial. Here the Palestinian presence in, and claim to, Palestine is not simply refused or covered up, but negated in such a way that the act of denial is itself denied. The effects of destruction and repression are reframed, inverted into affirmations of liberal virtues that can be passionately championed. In Tolerance Is a Wasteland, Saree Makdisi explores many such acts of affirmation and denial in a range of venues: from the haunted landscape of thickly planted forests covering the ruins of Palestinian villages forcibly depopulated in 1948; to the theater of "pinkwashing" as Israel presents itself to the world as a gay-friendly haven of cultural inclusion; to the so-called Museum of Tolerance being built on top of the ruins of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, which was methodically desecrated in order to clear the space for this monument to "human dignity." Tolerance Is a Wasteland reveals the system of emotional investments and curated perceptions that makes this massive project of cognitive dissonance possible.

Preparing the way -- Making London western -- Civilizing the ballad -- Episodes of occidentalism -- Domineering over others -- Occidentalism and the erotics of the self -- The occidental imperative -- Occidentalism in crisis -- "Irregular modernization."

The central argument of Edward Said's 'Orientalism' is that the relationship between Britain and its colonies was primarily oppositional, based on contrasts between conquest abroad and domestic order at home. Saree Makdisi directly challenges that premise in this book, identifying the convergence between the British Empire's civilizing mission abroad and a parallel mission within England itself, and pointing to romanticism as one of the key sites of resistance to the imperial culture in Britain after 1815.

In his author's note, Makdisi (English and comparative literature, UCLA) recalls hearing the name Occupied Palestine as a child in geography class, but not being told what "occupied" meant. Unfortunately, that is too often the case, especially in the media, but even in much of the academic literature, but here Makdisi offers a valuable corrective. He weaves a broad explanation of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza from the 1967 war through its institutionalization under various "peace accords" (set in the context of Israeli determination to establish a state defined by Jewish nationalism) together with, perhaps more importantly, a detailed examination of the everyday impacts of the varying levels of Israeli occupation policies, whether they be the "Separation Barrier" or "Apartheid Wall" cutting off Palestinians from their lands and neighbors, the networks of Jewish-only roads and Israeli army checkpoints making travel and commerce ever more difficult for Palestinians, the house demolitions, the restrictions on travel to and from the territories, the use of permits to limit the right of Palestinians to live in Jerusalem, the effective embargo of food and medicines to Gaza, or Jewish settler and Israeli military violence against Palestinians. Annotation ♭2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The years between 1790 and 1830 saw over a hundred and fifty million people brought under British imperial control, and one of the most momentous outbursts of British literary and artistic production, announcing a new world of social and individual traumas and possibilities. This book traces the emergence of new forms of imperialism and capitalism as part of a culture of modernisation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and looks at the ways in which they were identified with and contested in Romanticism. Saree Makdisi argues that this process has to be understood in global terms, beyond the British and European viewpoint, and that developments in India, Africa, and the Arab world (up to and including our own time) enable us to understand more fully the texts and contexts of British Romanticism. New and original readings of texts by Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Scott emerge in the course of this searching analysis of the cultural process of globalisation. Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1998

The Zionist project to remove or 'transfer' Palestinians from Palestine began but did not end in 1948; it continues to this very day. Since 1980, Jerusalem has been the central focus of the transfer process: the central hub of the project of coercively removing long-established Palestinian communities in order to make space for new Jewish arrivals. This paper examines the nature and mechanisms of this ongoing transfer from redrawing of boundaries and a system of checkpoints to the legal devices, complexities and manoeuvring employed to achieve the transfer of Palestinians, such as zoning, construction permits and even including documentation of the birth of a child. As the political, cultural and geographical core of the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians, Jerusalem serves, in effect, as a kind of microcosm of the wider conflict.