Authors: Ammiel Alcalay
ISBN-13: 9780816621545, ISBN-10: 0816621543
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Date Published: November 1992
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Besides grounding Middle Eastern literary studies in ongoing theoretical debates, and also serving as a wide-ranging introduction to inaccessible and neglected literature, After Jews and Arabs will compel a revision of Jewish studies by placing contemporary Israeli culture within its Middle Eastern context and the terms of colonial, postcolonial, postcolonial, and multicultural discourse.
The thesis in this difficult but important first book by Alcalay is that conventional modes of interpreting Western civilization--its history and belief in its own superiority to other cultures--have left little room for the complex play of Semitic and non-Semitic culture in the Levant, and for the roles of Arabs and Jews in the formation of European cultures. Alcalay, an associate professor of classical literature at Queens College (N.Y.), writes about the West's neglect of Jewish writers and thinkers from the Arab world and the Levant, about the suppression of Sephardic culture by a vehemently Eurocentric Zionism and about the relationship of ``the native Jew to a native space, namely the Levant,'' as a counterbalance to the myth of the Jew as an eternally wandering ``other.'' The book is also a valuable introduction to Levantine Hebrew and Arabic literatures, both medieval and modern, that have received little or no critical attention in English. One can only hope that this book will trigger interest in the work of Hebrew novelists Yitzhaq Shami and Yehuda Burla, essayist Eliyahu Eliachar and dozens of other writers cited by Alcalay, so that these works will become available in the U.S. (Nov.)
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction: Charting the Terrain | ||
I | People of the Book | |
II | Double Standards | |
III | Crossing Borders | |
IV | Europe and the Middle East | |
V | Language and Cultural Difference | |
VI | Nativity and Exile | |
VII | Reimagining History | |
1 | Discontinued Lines: Drafts for an Itinerary | |
I | Militant Archeology: Dispossessing Native Jews | |
II | Gazing at Palestine: Yosef Haim Brenner and Albert Antebbi | |
III | 1938: Beirut to Jerusalem via Damascus/An Itinerary for Edmond Jabs | |
IV | Cairo: From Umm Kulthum to Nawal Saadawi | |
V | Discourses of the City | |
VI | Beirut: Setting the Standards | |
VII | Beirut and the Poetics of Disaster | |
VIII | Jerusalem and the Crusader Man | |
IX | Jerusalem: The Islamic City | |
X | Turning the Page: Back to Damascus | |
2 | A Garden Enclosed: The Geography of Time | |
I | Traveling through Glass Walls: Defining the Levant | |
II | S. D. Goitein and the Geniza World | |
III | Cities and Texts | |
IV | The Common Currency of Verse | |
V | Dunash Ben Labrat and Classical Sephardic Poetry | |
VI | Yehuda al-Harizi and Old Metaphors | |
VII | The Scarlet Thread of Song: From Samuel Hanagid to Yehezkel Hai Albeg | |
VIII | The Spanish Inquisition and Jewish Humanism | |
IX | Missing Pages: Women's Poetry in the Levant | |
3 | History's Noise: The Beginning of the End | |
I | Colonialism and Literary Forms | |
II | Traveling in Time: Mordekhai HaKohen and Nahum Slouschz | |
III | Yitzhaq Shami, Yehuda Burla, and the Hebrew Novel | |
IV | Keys to the Garden: Albert Cohen and the Levantine Novel | |
V | The Alphabet of Nightmare | |
4 | Postscript: "To end, to begin again" | |
I | 1948: The End of an Era | |
II | New Hebrew: Language and Ideology | |
III | The New Order | |
IV | Shimeon Ballas, Sami Mikhael, and the New Israeli Novel | |
V | Israel/Palestine and the New Levant | |
VI | Recreating Memory: Alexandria and Baghdad in Israel | |
VII | Reclaiming Nativity: The Poetry of Shelley Elkayam, Ronny Someck, Tikva Levi, and Sami Shalom Chetrit | |
VIII | Anton Shammas and Israeli Hebrew as the Language of Exile | |
IX | Envisioning a Future: The Covenant of Sarah and Hagar | |
Notes | ||
Index |