UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Advancing Knowledge, Driving Change THE "POSTCOLONIAL" IN TRANSLATION: READING SAID IN HEBREW Author(s): Ella Shohat Source: Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Spring 2004), pp. 55-75 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine Studies Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2004.33.3.055 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of California Press and Institute for Palestine Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Palestine Studies JSTOR This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Fri, 28 Jun 2019 22:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
THE "POSTCOLONIAL" IN TRANSLATION: READING SAID IN HEBREW ELLA SHOHAT The essay focuses on the "travel" of various debates-orienta lism, post- colonialism, postzionism-between the US. and Israel, between one institutional zone and political semantics and another. Through a comparative history of these critical intellectual debates, the author considers some key moments and issues in the "translation" of Said's ideas into Hebrew. The reception of Sa id's work is enga ged in its contra - dictory dimensions, especially in liberal-leftist circles, where the desire to go-beyond-Said offers some ironic twists. The issues examined in- clude: the nature of the "post" in the concepts of the "post-colonial" and "post-Zionism"; the problem of "hybridity" and "resistance" in the land of partitions and walls; and the mediation in Israel, via the Anglo- American academy, of the "subaltern" intellectual. ALTHOUGH EDWARD SAID'S IDEAS have traveled through many worlds, writing about his work as a "traveling theory" requires a sense of cross-border mediation and translation, as ideas are hybridized, resisted, contained, and recontextualized. Here I will focus on one form of such "travel," that between the United States and Israel, a situation where the receiving space for Said's ideas is a nation-state whose very foundation engendered this specific intellectual's exile. When Said invokes the right of return to that same place-where a state possesses the power not only to authorize or deny his return but also to oversee the circu- lation of his texts about displacement-then the question of that intellectual's "out-of-placeness" becomes even more fraught. While my hope in this memorial issue would have been to tell a purely celebratory tale of Said's pervasive influence on Israeli intellectual life, the highly charged space of Zionism and Israel, and my own intricate positioning, make that task rather complicated. Beginning in the 1980s, my work initiated a ELLA SHOHAT is professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University. Her books include Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (University of Texas Press, 1989), Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (MIT Press, 1998), Forbidden Reminiscences