Reimagining Transnationalism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Challenges, Speculations, Risks: Differentiating From Israel
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 2003
What is it like to differentiate from a country, a culture? Is it even possible? This paper describes my struggle to differ- entiate from Israel. I share both the emotional and intellectual dimensions of my journey. The emotional plane is illustrated with a journal entry, and the intellectual through the meaning that I give to my experiences and the conclusions that I draw from them as a therapist. This paper is not a political statement but it does illustrate, I believe, the close and complicated relationship between what is public and what is personal.
After Israel: Towards Cultural Transformation
The book was nominated for the 'Palestinian Book Awards': http://www.palestinebookawards.com/authors/item/marcelo-svirsky. 'Grounded in his own experience, Marcelo Svirsky's controversial text is both theoretically sophisticated and accessible. After Israel is an original, engaging and beautifully written analysis of the political unit called Israel and how, through cultural transformation, it is possible to move beyond it.' Ronit Lentin, Associate Professor of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin 'After Israel is a secular book. It refuses to accept Zionism as a religious dogma; this excellent book rather dares to read Zionism as an episode in the history of Palestine, and of the two peoples that live there. This is neither an apocalypse nor a prophecy. It is a daring political and cultural analysis of the processes undermining the current Israeli regime that are at work today.' Ariella Azoulay, author of From Palestine to Israel and (with Adi Ophir) The One State Condition 'This is engaged cultural analysis at its best, offering insightful critiques of key ways of life and modes of being that constitute Israeli Zionism. A rare combination of sophisticated theory and fascinating, incisive detail, Svirsky captures the complexity of Jewish-Israeli subjectivities at the level of the practices of everyday life. After Israel is an important and provocative contribution to rethinking and remaking Israel-Palestine.' Chris Weedon, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University
Israel as homotopia: Language, space, and vicious belonging
Language in Society, 2019
Israel has recently succeeded in presenting itself as an attractive haven for LGBT constituencies. In this article, we investigate how this affective traction operates in practice, along with the ambiguous entanglement of normativity and antinormativity as expressed in the agency of some gay Palestinian Israe-lis vis-à-vis the Israeli homonationalist project. For this purpose, we analyze the documentary Oriented (2015), produced by the British director Jake Witzenfeld together with the Palestinian collective Qambuta Productions. More specifically, the aim of the article is twofold. From a theoretical perspective , we seek to demonstrate how Foucault's notion of heterotopia provides a useful framework for understanding the spatial component of Palestinian Israeli experience, and the push and pull of conflicted identity projects more generally. Empirically, we illustrate how Israel is a homotopia, an inherently ambivalent place that is simultaneously utopian and dystopian, and that generates what we call vicious belonging.
Arts 2019, 8(4), 159, 2019
The Israeli art field has been negotiating with the definition of Israeli-ness since its beginnings and more even today, as “transnationalism” has become not only a lived daily experience among migrants or an ideological approach toward identity but also a challenge to the Zionist-Hebrew identity that is imposed on “repatriated” Jews. Young artists who reached Israel from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) as children in the 1990s not only retained their mother tongue but also developed a hyphenated first-generation immigrant identity and a transnational state of mind that have found artistic expression in projects and exhibitions in recent years, such as Odessa–Tel Aviv (2017), Dreamland Never Found (2017), Pravda (2018), and others. Nicolas Bourriaud’s botanical metaphor of the radicant, which insinuates successive or even “simultaneous en-rooting”, seems to be close to the 1.5-generation experience. Following the transnational perspective and the intersectional approach (the “inter” being of ethnicity, gender, and class), the article examines, among others, photographic works of three women artists: Angelika Sher (born 1969 in Vilnius, Lithuania), Vera Vladimirsky (born 1984 in Kharkiv, Ukraine), and Sarah Kaminker (born 1987 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine). All three reached Israel in the 1990s, attended Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and currently live and work in Tel Aviv or (in Kaminker’s case) Haifa. The Zionist-oriented Israeli-ness of the Israeli art field is questioned in their works. Regardless of the different and peculiar themes and approaches that characterize each of these artists, their oeuvres touch on the senses of radicantity, strangeness, and displacement and show that, in the globalization discourse and routine transnational moving around, anonymous, generic, or hybrid likenesses become characteristics of what is called “home,” “national identity,” or “promised land.” Therefore, it seems that under the influence of this young generation, the local field of art is moving toward a re-framing of its Israeli national identity. View Full-Text Keywords: transnationality; radicantity; Israeli art; FSU 1.5-generation immigration; women artists; intersectional theory; contemporary photography
There are two main opposing narratives employed by Israel's elite in its interaction with the Diaspora: one depicts the Jewish state as ‘strong, protective and salvaging’ and the other portrays it as a weak nation that ‘dwells alone’. This article argues that it is not only the two opposing narratives but also the same imagination agent that is an essential element of both Israel's political goals for the Diaspora and the Diaspora's transnational characteristics. It will also present a model for analysing the relationship between historical trauma and threat from future traumas as imagination agents, the Homeland political goals and trauma as the main diasporic characteristic.