Dr. Ella Shohat’s essay originally appeared in Performance Journal #5 (Fall-Winter, 1992) p. 8, and was reprinted in the exhibition catalogue with permission by the author and journal. www.movementresearch.org. Please click here to read the essay in an outside website or here to download the catalogue.

Professor Ella Habiba Shohat teaches cultural studies and Middle Eastern studies at New York University. She has lectured and published extensively on issues having to do with race, gender, Eurocentrism, Orientalism, post/colonialism, transnationalism and diaspora, often transcending disciplinary and geographical boundaries. A substantial part of her work has examined theses issues in relation to the question of Arab-Jews. Her books include: winner of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award Unthinking Eurocentrism (co-authored with Robert Stam, Routledge, 1994), Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Duke Univ. Press, 2006), Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Univ. of Texas Press, 1989), Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (MIT 1998), as well as the co-edited volumes, Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and the Postcolonial Perspectives (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2003), and The Cultural Politics of the Middle East in the Americas to be published by the University of Michigan Press. Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism, in collaboration with Stam, has just been published by Routledge Press, and they are in the final stages of writing The Culture Wars in Translation (to be published by NYU press). Shohat has served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Critique, Meridians and Social Text, for which she co-edited recently a special issue dedicated to the memory of Edward Said. A recipient of Cornell University’s The Society for the Humanities fellowship and of Rockefeller Bellagio fellowship, she was awarded this year a senior fellowship at the International Center for Advance Studies at New York University.