ISBN: 9781845113131

Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: I.B Tauris, 2010
Language: English
Product Dimensions: 15.7 x 2.6 x 23.7 cm

This is a new edition of ‘Israeli Cinema’ with a substantial new postscript that reflects on the book’s initial reception and points to exciting new trends in the cinematic representation of Israel and Palestine. Ella Shohat explores the cinema as a productive site of national culture, dating back to the early Zionist films about turn-of-the-century Palestine. She offers a deconstructionist reading of Zionism, viewing the cinema as itself participating in the ‘invention’ of the nation. Unthinking the Eurocentric imaginary of ‘East versus West’, Shohat highlights the paradoxes of an anomalous national/colonial project through a number of salient issues, including the Sabra figure as a negation of the ‘Diaspora Jew’, the iconography of the land of Israel as a denial of Palestine, and the narrative role of ‘the good Arab’.