“New Texts Out Now: Evelyn Alsultany & Ella Shohat, Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora.” Jadaliyya, January 18th, 2013. (original) (raw)
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This article attempts to examine how Middle Eastern Americans settled in America in pursuit of happiness, a better life, and liberty, and the results of their expectations. Culture and religion play a significant role in lives of Middle Eastern Americans and actively effect people's attempts to be Americanized and forfeit their authenticity. Such cultural conflicts cause them to feel fragmented, split, or sometimes yearn for the days back in their homelands. People in diaspora, mostly fled from local communities, are culturally hybridized while attempting mimicry.
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Lifting the “Veil” Off the Literature of the Arab American Diaspora
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Although Arab-American literature has been in existence in the U.S. for over a century, it has only recently begun to be recognized as part of the ethnic landscape of literary America. However, the last two decades have seen a dramatic increase in the publication by Arab-American writers. This literary burgeoning reflects in part the shifting historical, social, and political contexts that have pushed Arab-Americans to the foreground, creating both new spaces for their voices and new urgencies of expression, as well as the flourishing creativity of these writers. From the 500-years-long presence of the Arabs on the North American continent, I have chosen three significant moments of reference, defining for the construction of the Americans’ awareness of the Arabic presence in the American cultural landscape.
Arena Journal, 2009
Ella Shohat is a rare example of an intellectual whose theoretical work has developed in close relation to her personal history and maintained an intricate connection to it throughout a huge variety of transdisciplinary projects. Being raised in Israel by Baghdadi parents, and speaking Arabic at home, she later moved to the United States to pursue her studies, experiencing yet another dimension of being out of place, an out-ofplaceness that has been manifold. This existential factor of never quite belonging where you are set, both personally and with respect to a chosen discipline, informs her prolific work, which spans a large spectrum ranging from film/media studies, literary theory and visual culture to Middle Eastern, Jewish and postcolonial studies. From her early critique of Zionist discourse as articulated through the history of Israeli cinema and through her deconstructive analysis of Eurocentric thinkingcarried out with her frequent collaborator Robert Stam -to the reformulation of the project of 'critical polycentric multiculturalism' and 'diasporic perspectives', Shohat's intellectual orientation has always been one of dismantling existing power structures and hierarchies. Not only does her work reveal the extent to which today's transnationalism and multiculturalism necessitate new modes of thinking, but it also emphasizes the complexity and sometimes contradictory nature of diasporic voices, which are seldom articulated with such clarity and rigour.