Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices

Born in Iraq and raised in Israel, Ella Shohat is an internationally renowned theorist of trans-national feminism and anti-colonialism, known not only for her scholarship but also for her activism. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices brings together for the first time in one volume a selection of her groundbreaking essays. Written between 1985 and 2005, the twelve essays in this collection include some of Shohat's best known pieces as well as one new essay. Together they trace a powerful intellectual trajectory as Shohat rigorously teases out the implications of multicultural critique, whether to rethink feminism through a consideration of race, Zionism through a focus on ethnicity, or colonialism through attention to gender and sexuality. Consistently crossing disciplinary and regional boundaries, she demonstrates that gender, cultural difference, and colonial history are intimately bound together and often can only be understood in relation to one another. Shohat analyzes how diverse representational practices--be they visual, textual, or even scientific--relate to the construction of gender, race, sexuality, and national identity. Revealing the breathtaking scope of her thinking, this collection includes explorations of subjects ranging from the links between the representations of America and Palestine to the intertwining of racial and gender ideologies in refiguring of Cleopatra, from the gender politics of laser laparoscopy to the theoretical implications of film subtitling, and from the role of maps and mapping in imperial culture to the reception of Edward Said's work among left-wing intellectuals in Israel. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices not only illuminates many of the debates--about collective memory and visual culture to name just two--that animated the study of cultural politics over the past two decades. It also points the way forward.