About

Professor Ella Shohat teaches at the departments of Art & Public Policy and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies at New York University. She has lectured and written extensively on issues related to post/colonial and transnational approaches to Cultural studies. Her notable publications include 'And the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings,' which received the Middle East Monitor Palestine Book Award in the 'Memoir Category,' as well as 'Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices,' 'Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation,' and 'Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age.' Shohat has also co-edited works such as 'Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives' and 'Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora,' the latter earning an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Arab American Book Award. Her scholarly contributions include coauthoring 'Unthinking Eurocentrism' with Robert Stam and authoring 'Flagging Patriotism,' 'Race in Translation,' and 'Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media.' Her research focuses on cultural politics, diaspora, gender, and postcolonial studies, with her work translated into multiple languages. She has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals and received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Art
• History
• Literature
• Ancient history
• Gender studies
• Law
• Anthropology
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• Art history
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• “Judeo-Arabic” and the Separationist Thesis

  Palestine/Israel Review · 2024-02-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This essay questions the axiomatic ontology of the “Judeo-Arabic language” as a cohesive unit separate from Arabic and its entanglement in the persistent ambivalence surrounding the conjoining of “the Jewish” and “the Arab.” In the wake of the partition of Palestine and the dislocation of Arab-Jews to Israel, classificatory categories, which can be traced to the nineteenth-century academic meeting ground of Semitic/Oriental and Hebraic/Judaic studies, came to be reinforced in the twentieth century within Zionist discourse. Largely shaped by foundational scholars of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, knowledge production about Arabic-speaking Jews was embedded in what the essay regards as “Judeo-Arabic Orientalism.” Entrenched in the politics of linguistic naming is a partitioning ethnonationalist imaginary of culture and belonging. The epistemic framework undergirding “Judeo-Arabic language” is emblematic of what the essay refers to as “the separationist thesis.” Revisiting a few key arguments, the essay traces the genealogy not of a language but rather of an idea of a language, highlighting the invention of a paradoxical formation—an Arabic that is at once non-Arabic.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Contents

  New York University Press eBooks · 2022-06-26

  paratextOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Reluctant Eulogy: Fragments from the Memories of an Arab-Jew

  Berghahn Books · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Ancient history
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• 6 A Conversation with Rashid Khalidi

  New York University Press eBooks · 2022-06-26 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Post-Third-Worldist Culture

  2022-12-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Feminist work within national movements and ethnic communities has not formed part of the generally monocultural agenda of Euro-“feminism.” In cinema studies, what has been called “feminist film theory” since the 1970s has often suppressed the historical, economic, and cultural contradictions among women. Notions of nation and race, along with community-based work are implicitly dismissed as both too “specific” to qualify for the theoretical realm of “feminist film theory” and as too “inclusive” in their concern for nation and race that they presumably “lose sight” of feminism. Macho culture is dissected and analyzed within the overlaid cultural histories, in terms of the need to revolutionize gender relations in the postrevolution era. Gendered racism left its mark on Enlightenment aesthetics. The measurements and rankings characteristic of the new sciences were wedded to aesthetic value judgments derived from an Apollonian reading of a de-Dionysianized Greece.

  PublisherDOI

• THE ARAB–JEW AND THE INSCRIPTION OF MEMORY

  The American University in Cairo Press eBooks · 2022-10-18 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Disorienting Cleopatra: A Modern Trope of Identity

  Transition · 2022-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The split Arab/Jew figure revisited

  Patterns of Prejudice · 2020-03-14 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this essay, Shohat argues that the question of the Arab-Jew, in contrast to present-day ethnonationalist common sense, must be rearticulated as mutually constitutive categories, so as to address the complex imaginaries of both ‘the Arab’ and ‘the Jew’. Elaborating on her earlier dialogue with Edward Said’s account of the bifurcated Oriental/Semitic myth—one rendered as the Orientalist (the Jew) and the other as the Oriental (the Arab)—Shohat offers a genealogical reading of this gradual splitting, locating it prior to the partition of Palestine and even to the emergence of Zionism, and tracing it back to the dissemination of a colonial-inflected Enlightenment discourse. More crucially, Shohat asks where the indigenous Jew of ‘the Orient’, and more specifically the Arab-Jew, might fit conceptually within this split. Today, with the epic-scale reconceptualization of belonging in the wake of partition, diasporization and competing nationalist imaginaries, the Arab-Jew figure silently occupies an ambiguous position within the bifurcation. Yet a critical analysis of the Orientalist splitting that sidesteps the question of the Arab-Jew risks reproducing the fixed ethnonationalist lexicon that posits Jewishness and Arabness as irreconcilable. At the same time, this very ambiguity, Shohat argues, was already fomented with the imperial ‘translation’ of the Enlightenment project into a racialized idiom, now applied differentially to the Muslim and the Jew-within-the-Orient. This essay traces such representational ruptures back to the nineteenth century, examining various instances of what the essay regards as ‘the de-indigenization of the Arab-Jew’. To illustrate her thesis, Shohat examines the gendered imagining of both Jewish and Muslim communities within a relational and transnational comparative framework. Orientalist tropes such as the odalisque, the hammam and the un/veiled female had long been projected on to Muslim and Jewish women throughout the region but, with the emergence of imperial ‘minorities’ discourse, the exoticized Jew-in-the-Orient became the object of a gendered rescue phantasy, as vividly illustrated in Dehodencq’s painting L’Exécution de la juive. Rather than a document of Muslim antisemitism, however, the colonial visual archive inadvertently registers what Shohat defines as a ‘split-within-the split’, highlighting the novel formation of an ambivalent indigeneity for Arab-Jews within ‘the Orient’. Yet the aesthetic dispositions also inadvertently and paradoxically reveal an underlying, thoroughly syncretic and shared Judaeo-Muslim cultural geography. Here the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew reveals an intricate landscape of belonging that offers an alternative conceptual framework in which to discuss the ruptures prior to the grand rupture of partition, and to illuminate the post/colonial transformation that dramatically impacted the narrative of Jewish at-homeness within Muslim spaces.

  PublisherDOI

• 2. Lost Homelands, Imaginary Returns

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 101 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices brings together for the first time a selection of trailblazing essays by Ella Shohat, an internationally renowned theorist of postcolonial and cultural studies of Iraqi-Jewish background. Written over the past two decades, these twelve essays—some classic, some less known, some new—trace a powerful intellectual trajectory as Shohat rigorously teases out the consequences of a deep critique of Eurocentric epistemology, whether to rethink feminism through race, nationalism through ethnicity, or colonialism through sexuality. Shohat’s critical method boldly transcends disciplinary and geographical boundaries. She explores such issues as the relations between ethnic studies and area studies, the paradoxical repercussions for audio-visual media of the “graven images” taboo, the allegorization of race through the refiguring of Cleopatra, the allure of imperial popular culture, and the gender politics of medical technologies. She also examines the resistant poetics of exile and displacement; the staging of historical memory through the commemorations of the two 1492s, the anomalies of the “national” in Zionist discourse, the implications of the hyphen in the concept “Arab-Jew,” and the translation of the debates on orientalism and postcolonialism across geographies. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices not only illuminates many of the concerns that have animated the study of cultural politics over the past two decades; it also points toward new scholarly possibilities.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• George Custen

  City University of Hong Kong

  49 shared

• A. R. De Paz

  49 shared

• Kevin Yip

  City University of Hong Kong

  49 shared

• Autero Ripstein

  City University of Hong Kong

  49 shared

• Kristie Falco

  City University of Hong Kong

  49 shared

• Teresa Ix Calvina

  City University of Hong Kong

  49 shared

• Katie Wong

  California Institute of Technology

  49 shared

• Wilma Jones

  City University of Hong Kong

  49 shared

Awards & honors

• Middle East Monitor Palestine Book Award in the “Memoir Cate…
• Katherine Kovacs Singer Best Film Book Award for 1994