Reviews 321

Editor’s note: IJMES ordinarily reviews books only within three years of publication. How-
ever, we are publishing this review due to extenuating circumstances that prevented its pub-
lication at an earlier date.

ELLA SHOHAT, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2006) Pp. 406. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paperback.

REVIEWED BY REBECCA LUNA STEIN, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Women’s

Studies, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; e-mail: rlstein@duke.edu
DOI: 10.1017/S0020743808080604

Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices is a collection of Ella Shohat’s landmark writings from
the last two decades, including both new and republished essays. Taken together, this
collection makes a set of indispensable arguments about the interplay between culture,
empire, race, gender, and the politics of representation in dissimilar geohistorical contexts.
This kind of comparativist inquiry is at the crux of Shohat’s intellectual project and turns on
a critical method that she refers to as “relationality,” that is, a mode of scholarly inquiry that
“stress[es] the horizontal and vertical links that thread communities and histories together
in a conflictual network” (p. 207). A relational approach, Shohat contends, “operates at
once within, between and beyond the nation–state framework, [and] calls attention to the
conflictual, hybrid interplay between communities within and across borders” (p. 207).
“Relationality” should not be misread as “transnationality” in any limited sense. The term
also marks Shohat’s investment in “crossovers and echoes” between scholarly disciplines,
theoretical vocabularies, and historical contexts (p. xiv).
The collection’s thematic and theoretical range is broad. Taboo Memories includes
discussion of feminist, postcolonial, and transnational debates; critical interrogations of Third
World cinema and media theory; and grounded analyses of the links among race, gender,
and empire. Much of this material will be extremely useful for scholars working in Middle
East studies because it offers a set of theoretical paradigms and interdisciplinary linkages
that remain beyond the purview of much Middle East studies writing to date. Middle East
contexts and archives can be found throughout the volume. Her writing on cinema is attentive
to what she calls the “Cinematic Orient,” particularly as manifest in the figure of the harem
(“Gender and the Culture of Empire”). Elsewhere she queries the image of Cleopatra as it
has circulated in contemporary media debates (“Disorienting Cleopatra”), an essay important
for the ways it brings questions of race to bear on Orientalist discourses. Many of Shohat’s
landmark writings on Zionist discourse and cultural production are reprinted in this volume,
the extension of a project that first came to the attention of most U.S. academics with
Shohat’s first monograph, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation
(1987). Her work in this area has been bold and trailblazing, challenging dominant Israeli
political paradigms and the prevailing terms by which academics have studied the Zionist
project. Shohat’s insistence on reading the Israeli nation–state through a colonial lens has
been met with considerable unease among Israeli publics—particularly so in the 1980s, before
the Oslo process made such conversations more palatable within the Israeli academy and
popular media. In the two decades since, scholars in both the Israeli and U.S. academies have
increasingly used the language of colonialism to narrate the Israeli nation-making project. Yet
very few scholars working on either Israeli or Palestinian cultural studies have substantially
engaged in postcolonial theoretical debates or brought postcolonial analytics to bear on their
scholarship—this despite the founding imprint of Edward Said on the postcolonial field. Ella
Shohat’s work remains groundbreaking in this regard.
322 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 40 (2008)

Most of Shohat’s writing on Israeli cultural politics has been concerned with the status
of Arab-Jews (or Mizrahim) in Israel, namely, their history of dispossession by and within
the Israeli state and the ways that Israeli popular culture and discourse have participated in
this dispossession. Indeed, it was Shohat that brought Mizrahim to the attention of the U.S.
academy with her 1988 essay “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish
Victims,” a rejoinder to Edward Said in The Question of Palestine. Many of the essays in this
book continue this important project, pushing her earlier work in new directions. The territory
covered is expansive, including attention to the racial logics of Israeli modernization discourse,
the blind spots within Zionist historiography, and the “invention of the Mizrahim” (p. 332)
by state and popular Israeli discourse, as well as critical discussion of the importation of
postcolonial theory into the Israeli academy. Her work in these areas is always comparative
in ways that push powerfully against the discourse of Zionist exceptionalism. In “Taboo
Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews,” she urges us to consider
the linkages between histories that are not traditionally viewed in tandem, arguing that “[t]he
same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands, and national-
political rights was intimately linked to the process that affected the dispossession of Arab-
Jews from their property, lands, and rootedness in Arab countries” (p. 222). This linkage
forcefully inscribes Mizrahim onto the cultural geography of the Arab Middle East even as
it asks that our studies of the Israeli occupation also be mindful of repressive state processes
within Israel’s borders. Although somewhat overshadowed in this volume, Shohat is also
making a bold call for a new Mizrahi studies—a relational mode of scholarly inquiry that
would map Mizrahim transnationally in ways that refuse the hermeticism of both Zionist and
Arab nationalist historiography.
Shohat’s methodological contributions are, in and of themselves, considerable—particularly
so for scholars working in the Middle East studies context. Taken together, the essays in this
collection productively disorient the field of Middle East studies, introducing a set of analytics
and methodologies that many scholars in the field have engaged only reluctantly at best.
Shohat poses a version of this methodological provocation in her introduction: “One of the
challenges facing multicultural/transnational feminism has to do with the translation of theories
and actions from one context to another. In an Arab Muslim context, where feminism is often
denounced as a Western import, and where Arab Muslim women articulate their version of
what constitutes gender struggle, what would it mean to deploy a poststructuralist perspective
that would critique the notions of experience, authenticity, and essentialism?” (p. 7). Like
other questions posed in the volume’s introduction, this one is meant to stimulate a rethinking
of prevailing scholarly paradigms rather than to provide a facile blueprint for their remaking.
Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices is indispensable reading for those engaged in the important
work of pushing Middle East studies further.

DAGMAR GLAß, Der Muqtat.af und seine Öffentlichkeit. Aufklärung, Räsonnement und Mei-
nungsstreit in der frühen arabischen Zeitschriftenkommunikation, 2 vols. (Würzburg,
Germany: Ergon Verlag, 2004). Pp. 765. €94 paper.

REVIEWED BY PETER WIEN, History Department, University of Maryland, College Park, Md.;
e-mail: pwien@umd.edu
DOI: 10.1017/S0020743808080616

Der Muqtat.af und seine Öffentlichkeit is an impressive and well-conceived study that combines
the rich tradition of German Oriental philology with modern approaches and methodology of