Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture

This important volume rethinks the traditional parameters of Middle East studies and the dominant trends in scholarship on Israel and Palestine by focusing on popular culture–from the internet to music videos, tourism to advertising, comics to cafe culture. The essays in this collection challenge the idea that the production and consumption of culture is peripheral to history and politics. They demonstrate that attention to popular culture yields deeper and more nuanced accounts of politics and power. Further, the contributors consider Israel and Palestine not as discrete national entities but rather in relation to one another, as mutually constituted within regional and global political, economic, and cultural processes. Scholars from the fields of history, sociology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, anthropology, and political science look at how narratives of occupation and resistance circulate in popular culture in Israel and the occupied territories and in the broader regional and global spheres. They contemplate Israeli films of the 1980s and 1990s, Palestinian underground music, Israeli tourism to Palestinian villages, the rendering of the conflict in journalist Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Palestine, urban life in nineteenth-century Jerusalem, the use of the internet in Palestinian refugee camps, and more. Together, these essays signal broader approaches and new conceptual paradigms within which the cultural politics of Palestine and Israel might be understood. Contributors Livia Alexander Carol Bardenstein Elliot Colla Amy Horowitz Laleh Khalili Mary Layoun Mark Levine Joseph Massad Melani McAlester Ilan Pappe Rebecca L. Stein Ted Swedenburg Salim Tamari