CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Ideology and Its Discontents: Between Textuality and
Zionism
Organisers: Louise Bethlehem and Neve Gordon
Rottenberg, Catherine (Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, Israel) ENGENDERING ZIONISM: THE CASE OF EMMA LAZARUS
While many scholars have commented on the polemical aspects of Emma Lazarus'
"Jewish" poetry, most have concentrated on her use of religious and
racial imagery but have failed to acknowledge the centrality of gender tropes in
her writing. In this paper, I argue that it is precisely through the invocation
and manipulation of such tropes that Lazarus articulates her version of
Jewishness. The Jewish identity that she constructs is linked, on the one hand,
to her call for the re-nationalization of Palestine by Eastern European Jews, a
call that was indeed radical for the time. But on the other hand, the same
identity is saturated with reactionary elements, most striking of which is her
re-imagining and refashioning of the Ostjuden. Thus, in her poems she strives to
create a "new" Jewish masculinity by eulogizing the virtues of the
"last Warrior Jew" and extolling the "Maccabean marshal
fire." This is particularly interesting in the context of the 1880s and the
emergence of the Zionist project. Emma Lazarus, a woman who precedes Zionism's
"founding fathers" e.g., Herzl and Nordau refigures Jewish maleness in
hyper-masculine terms, and yet, in doing so, she unwittingly exposes the
problematic nature of all identity claims. Her poetry, I argue, discloses how
"self"-fashioning is always a site of instability and contestation.
Gordon, Neve (Ben-Gurion University of
the Negev, Israel) IDEOLOGY AND TRANSLATION: BETWEEN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND
ZIONISM
This paper examines the translation of classic political philosophy into Hebrew,
arguing that a variety of ideological positions can be disclosed simply by
examining the processes of erasure put into effect during translation. Exploring
the connection between translation and nation-building, I claim that segments
from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, John Locke's Two Treaties of Government and
Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan were excised in Hebrew translation in the service of a
Zionist identity politics. Insofar as Zionism is a discursive formation, its
production and maintenance involves the expulsion of components that may hinder
the fabrication of a unified identity, given the potential for
counter-narratives to disrupt the nation's totalizing of its own boundaries, and
thus to disturb, in Homi Bhabha's words, "those ideological maneuvers
through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities." By
way of conclusion, I argue that the altered texts are in effect a sign that one
ideology overpowered another and led, as it were, to the corruption of the
spirit underlying the original project of translating classics into Hebrew, a
project that was initiated by Leon Roth for quite different ideological reasons.
Bar-Yosef, Eitan (Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev, Israel) ZIONISM'S AFRICAN FANTASY: GUTMAN'S LOBENGULU
South Africa, Jacqueline Rose has recently noted (1996), often functions in
Israeli literature "as the unlived life of Israel". Indeed, from as
early as the Uganda scheme of 1903-envisioning a Jewish colony in Africa that
would operate, according to Herzl, as "a miniature England in
reverse"-to Ehud Barak's assertion that "Israel is a villa in the
jungle", images of Africa have been central to Zionism's self-fashioning.
Nahum Gutman's Lobengulu King of Zulu offers an early articulation of this
imaginary: written during his visit to South Africa in 1934 (to paint a portrait
of Smuts), and serialized in 1935-6 (against the backdrop of the Palestinian
uprising), Gutman's adventure-story instantly became an Israeli children's
bestseller. By examining Gutman's rewriting of the British/South-African
imperial romance-with its fantasy of an ancient Semitic Africa-and exploring
later texts in which he re-enacts his African adventures within Palestine
itself, this paper will consider the ways in which Gutman's cheerful naïveté
both sanctified and destabilized the colonial ambition which underlies the
Zionist project. I will conclude by asking how this ambivalence could anticipate
the role of "Africa" in post-Apartheid Zionist culture.
Bethlehem, Louise (Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Israel) DISPLACED NARRATIVES: ZIONISM MEETS AFRIKANER NATIONALISM
This paper examines the writings of Manfred Nathan, a significant Zionist and
Jewish communal leader in the Union of South Africa, particularly with respect
to Nathan's role as sympathetic chronicler of Afrikaner history. Nathan's
articulations as philo-Afrikaner historian are, I claim, a function of socially
constituted forms, narratives and relations that may or may not be commensurate
with one another. The contradictions attendant on Nathan's complex identity as a
Zionist and South African nationalist are a index of his "hybridity"-a
notion Homi Bhabha uses to account for the "in-between" nature of
colonial subject-posiitons (1994). It is the crisis or conflict of this
hybridity, I suggest, that inflects the projective transference of Zionist
tropes and narratives onto the core of Nathan's Afrikaner historiography in an
effort to domesticate his own difference-his Anglicized German Jewishness. In
conclusion, I seek to show how Nathan attempts to renegotiate Zionist identity
for his South African Jewish constituency as a means of sanctioning, and of
being sanctioned by, Afrikaner nationalism.
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