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After Jews and Arabs Remaking Levantine Culture
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$108.00 cloth |
By exposing the rich and diverse textual and cultural legacy of this time and space, Alcalay reassesses the exclusion of Semitic culture in Europe from the perspective of contemporary Arabic culture and opposing images of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This book will compel a revision of Jewish studies by placing contemporary Israeli culture within its Middle Eastern context and the terms of colonial, postcolonial, and multicultural discourse. “In discussing Juan Goytisolo, Ammiel Alcalay writes of ‘the kind of internal and external attack on received ideas that can radically realign the past, snap it back into an entirely different focus.’ This is precisely his own accomplishment in After Jews and Arabs, a passionate and fervently erudite revision of Levantine culture. Alcalay’s Levant is a roomy mansion of letters, an exemplification of Adonis’s line ‘Only poetry knows how to marry this space.’ Armed with his faith in art, Alcalay ranges from the Inquisition to Franco, from Damascus to Andalusia to today's Jerusalem, redefining the study of Mediterranean culture. Like a scholarly Edmond Jabes, he uses his imagination to leap borders. By the end of this book, his first, he succeeds in dismantling ‘those bloated signifiers “Arab” and “Jew”’ and returning to all of us what we can now in all frankness and without shame be called Levantine writing and Levantine art.” —Voice Literary Supplement “Alcalay’s splendid work takes as its target the tropes of dispersion and exile as they have come to define the central narrative of modern Jewish history. Alcalay has succeeded magnificently in demonstrating the extraordinary cultural richness and complexity that exists to be recovered in the history of the peoples and cultures of the Levantine world. He also provides an important service by revealing the ideological baggage informing contemporary curriculum assumptions, such as the Romance culture and Arabic culture are so different as to be almost unbridgeable-an incomprehensible idea to a twelfth-century Parisian. Yet his most important contribution may ultimately derive from his vision of the history of Levantine culture as a source of possibility for the future.” —SubStance “The author places contemporary Israeli culture within its Middle Eastern context and the terms of colonial, postcolonial, and multicultural discourse.” —Shofar “Ammiel Alcaly’s book is among the most exciting and important to have appeared in recent years on the subject of Jews and Arabs and the wider link with Levantine culture.” —Ariel "Painstakingly, brick by brick, he has reconstructed a shared literary and historical tradition that has linked Arab and Oriental Jewish thought for the better part of a millennium." —Victor Perera Ammiel Alcalay is a writer, translator, and poet living in New York City. Currently an assistant professor of classical and Oriental literatures at Queens College (CUNY), he has written numerous articles on literary and historical politics in the cultures of the Mediterranean. 288 pages | 1992 |
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$36.00 paper