While the scholarly study of culture as a politically contested sphere in Palestine/Israel has become an established field over the past two decades, this volume highlights some particular understudied aspects of it: the relations between Arab identity, Mizrahi identity, and Israeli nationalism; the nightclub scene as a field of encounter, appropriation, and exclusion; an analysis of the institutional and political conditions of Palestinian cinema; the implications of the intersectional relationship between gender, ethnicity and national identity in the field of popular culture, and the concrete relations between particular aesthetic forms and symbolic power.
The authors come from diverse disciplines, including anthropology, architecture, ethnomusicology, history, sociology, and political science.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.
1. Introduction: culture and politics in Palestine/Israel
Tamir Sorek
2. Dancing with tears in our eyes: political hipsters, alternative culture and binational urbanism in Israel/ Palestine
Merav Kaddar and Daniel Monterescu
3. Face control: everynight selection and “the other”
Yotam Hotam and Avihu Shoshana
4. The impossible quest of Nasreen Qadri to claim colonial privilege in Israel
Nadeem Karkabi
5. Mediterraneanism in conflict: development and settlement of Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants in Gaza and Yamit
Fatina Abreek- Zubiedat and Alona Nitzan- Shiftan
6. Songs of subordinate integration: music education and the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel during the Mapai era
Oded Erez and Arnon Yehuda Degani
7. Self- categorization, intersectionality and creative freedom in the cultural industries: Palestinian women filmmakers in Israel
Amal Jamal and Noa Lavie
8. Religious symbolism and politics: hijab and resistance in Palestine
Samira Alayan and Lana Shehadeh
9. Anniversaries of ‘first’ settlement and the politics of Zionist commemoration
Liora R. Halperin
Biography
Tamir Sorek is Liberal Arts Professor of Middle East History at Pennsylvania State University. He studies culture as field of conflict and resistance, particularly in the context of Palestine/Israel. His research has highlighted the political role of sports, poetry, and collective memory.
