Table of Contents

Contents: Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. Beginnings in the Yishuv: Promised Land and Civilizing Mission “Making the Desert Bloom:” The Production of Emptiness Imaging Palestine: Pioneer Sabras and Exotic Arabs The War of Languages Chapter 2. Post-1948: The Heroic-Nationalist Genre State of Siege and Didactic Allegories The Orient and the Promethean Narrative Spectacle of War in the Wake of 1967 Chapter 3. The Representation of Sephardim/Mizrahim Orientalism and its Discontents The Bourekas and the Carnivalesque Narrating Nation and Modernization Rescue Fantasies and the Libidinal South Arab-Jews, Dislocation and Nostalgia The Imaginary of Inside/Outside Chapter 4. Personal Cinema and the Politics of Allegory The Context of Production Reflexivity, Parody and the Zionist Epic Personal Cinema and the Diverse New Waves The Seeds of Disillusionment The Foregrounding of Marginality The Hidden Face of Militarism The Signification of Style Marginality Revisited Chapter 5. The Return of the Repressed: The Palestinian Wave in Recent Israeli Cinema The Focalization of Politics The Politics of Focalization Postscript Writing Between “the National” and “the Colonial” The Politics of Representation Revisited Addressing the Intertext Palestinians-in-Israel: Cinematic Citizenship in the Liminal Zone Independence, Nakba and the Visual Archive Iconographies of Spatial Anxiety The Arab-Jew and the Inscription of Memory The Mizrahi Cinema of Displacement Revisionist Cultural Practices Translation, Reception and Traveling Postcolonialism Notes Selected Bibliography Index

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Explores the cinema as a productive site of national culture, dating back to the early Zionist films about turn-of-the-century Palestine. This book offers a deconstructionist reading of Zionism, viewing the cinema as itself participating in the 'invention' of the nation.

About the Author

Ella Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University. Her books include 'Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices', 'Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age', and with Robert Stam 'Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media' and 'Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism'.

Reviews

'Shohat's Israeli Cinema is a tour-de-force. Not only is it theoretically sophisticated, it is also deeply rooted in the changing politics andperceptions of the Israeli predicament as they bear upon Israeli films. With brillianthumanistic insight, Shohat describes the underlying ideological myths and allegoricalstructures and contributes significantly to a new, enlarged understanding of the dynamicsbetween Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities, and between them and the Palestinians.' - Edward Said