I would like to revisit the poetry and political thought of the Jewish National poet Haim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), and offer a radical Mizrahi reading—namely, a reading that examines Jewish and Israeli history and culture through the radical Mizrahi discourse that evolved in Israel in the past generation, as part of Mizrahi resistance to the cultural and social oppression relations between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim(1). This new Mizrahi discourse comprises two dimensions: criticism and alternative. The critical dimension focuses on viewing the state’s founding and dominant ideology and movement – Ashkenazi Zionism – as a national Jewish-European organization that is politically neo-colonial, economically capitalist, and culturally Eurocentric-Orientalist(2). The alternative dimension focuses on economic, political and cultural reform of the country and society. Within this broad generalization there are shades and nuances, of course, and a number of tensions, both theoretical and political, particularly on the question of the Palestinian national struggle (3). Equipped with these critical lenses, I shall try to read Bialik’s poems both in the context of their own time, and in the Israeli context of my own life. I have chosen to read three Bialik poems which I believe are most central to his national poetry, although the first was written in his early days of emerging nationalism: “To the Bird” (“El Hatzipor”) from 1892, “A Small Missive” (“Igeret Ktana”) from 1893, and “City of the Killings” (“Be’ir Hahareiga”) from 1903. Alongside these poems, and in their light, I would like to revisit two lesser known lectures that Bialik delivered, but which are nonetheless critical to our discussion: “The Revival of the Sephardim” (“Tchiyat Hasefaradim”), which he gave to an audience of young Sephardim in Jerusalem in 1926, and “Eretz Yisrael,” (The land of Israel) which he delivered to Jewish youths in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, 1929. My methodology is critical criticism – deconstructive on its mechanics and Saidian-orientalism on its politico-cultural content. (1) See for example: Chetrit, Sami S. “Mizrahi Politics in Israel: Between Integration and Alternative.” Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. 29, No. 4 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 51-65. (2) See: Shohat, Ella. “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Point of View of Its Jewish victims.” Social Text, 19–20, Fall 1988: 1–35. (3) For a recent remapping of the Mizrahi discourse, see: Behar Moshe, “Mizrahim, Abstracted: Action, Reflection, and the Academization of the Mizrahi Cause.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. XXXVII, No. , Winter 2008, Issue 146. Pp. 89-100.

Translation was not just the prime vehicle through which early-twentieth-century Egyptian intellectuals assimilated European literature and thought into Egypt, but also the trope that some of those intellectuals used to describe both the failed and the desired Egyptian nation. Writing in 1928, the Egyptian writer and critic Muhammad Haykal—author of what is usually called the first Arabic novel (Zaynab, 1913) and editor-in-chief of the major newspaper al-Siyasa—compared 1920s Egypt to the Tower of Babel, arguing that the nation’s chaotic mix of secularist versus Azharite intellectual tendencies, languages, and even modes of dress had plunged Egypt into a state of mutual intranational untranslatability. According to Haykal, this state—if left unchecked—ultimately would undercut the efforts of European-educated Egyptians to “culture” the minds of their compatriots back home and to foster the “freedom of thought” and expression proper to a cohesive (read: centralized) nation. That same year, the Egyptian critic Ahmad Hasan Al-Zayyat (later editor-in-chief of the periodical al-Risala) blamed Egypt’s incoherence on the “chaos” of Arabic literature and the dangerous indeterminacy of its boundaries and rules. Claiming that Arabic literature had been frozen for centuries in arrested “incompletion”—as an amalgam of disjunctive tongues and cultural forms thrown together by the rise of Islam—al-Zayyat argued the incompatibility of an unreformed Arabic literary tradition with national modernity. Here again “tradition” is suspect for its Babel-like heterogeneity. In this paper, I argue that the writings of Haykal, al-Zayyat, and others suggest that Egypt would not become “orderly” and take its place among “civilized” (European) nations until its culture had changed from one in which nothing was translatable into one in which everything was translatable, everything commensurable. I show that such assertions hark back to nineteenth-century ideologies of colonial origin, which maintained that modern Egypt was not a nation because it was “a melange without unity,” an “assemblage of different races of Asia and Africa” whose diverse traits “do not add up to a physiognomy”—a coherent, monoethnic face. (The words are those of the Egyptian-born French Orientalist Joseph Agoub, translated into Arabic in 1834.) I contend that the effort to institute Egyptian nationality surrendered Egypt to imperial translationality, eradicating any and all local incommensurability within a “national universal” of European colonial origins. What is lost, I ask, in the nation’s demand for a culture in which everything is translatable?

My paper argues that Sonallah Ibrahim’s1992 novel, Zaat, provides a theoretically sophisticated narrative of Egypt’s fast-growing consumer society—what we might term its ongoing infitah. Academic writing on the subject of Egypt’s consumer culture is only now beginning to catch up with its subject matter. Ibrahim’s novel is noteworthy for its early attempt to historicize this sea-change in the Egyptian lifestyle, which introduced a new pace and intensity into the rhythms of consumption. Zaat provides a narrative of this consumer culture’s emergence, as well as developing some of tools needed for its critique. The novel is also noteworthy for the blackly humorous way that it registers the effects of a massive flood of commodities on the realm of what Henri Lefebvre calls “the everyday”—the realm of gossip and desire, taste and temporality. The world of Zaat is a quotidian world of commodities: its characters are determined—typologically speaking, but also in their own minds—by the (reified) things that they own, or buy, or wish they could purchase. In my paper, I focus on the four most significant of these objects: the television, the automobile, food, and newspapers. In each case I attempt to explain the centrality of these objects, both to the novel and to the Egyptian historical experience it tries to narrate. This requires that I give some intellectual and sociological context for the introduction of these various objects and technologies into Egypt. So, for example, in speaking of the television, I borrow some ideas from the work of anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod to show the ways in which the female characters of Zaat are figured as what she calls “objects of development.” In the case of food, a perishable commodity, I try to show how Zaat’s various adventures with false expiration dates and rotten vegetables can be read as an attempt, in the words of Arjun Appardurai, “to re-situate consumption in time.” Ibrahim shows that the ever-more rapid temporalities of modern consumption are only effective when they distinguish themselves from a more generalized condition of rancidness, corruption and disintegration, which is the physical and political climate of Ibrahim’s novel. In a concluding section, I attempt to show that Ibrahim’s focus on the realm of the everyday—a focus that is a constant in his literary production—is one way of understanding his method of “documentary” fiction, which I argue should be read as a powerful new mode of realism.

Ebru: Reflections of Cultural Diversity in Turkey is a mixed media project that includes large-format photographs by Attila Durak, Turkish folk music in multiple indigenous languages performed by the Bo?aziçi University Folklore Club, and a book with more than 300 photographs of 44 ethnic groups and essays on cultural diversity from prominent Turkish writers. A rotating panel of writers accompanies the exhibit to each venue to discuss what Ebru means on a more personal level. This paper chronicles a year of ethnographic fieldwork, during which I followed Ebru as it traveled to ten Turkish cities. I conducted exit interviews and walked through the exhibit with people as they encountered the images of more than 40 ethnic groups living in Turkey today. I also interviewed panelists and recorded responses and comments during the panel discussions. I discovered intense and varying responses to the suggestion that Turkey continues to be a culturally diverse nation. In this paper I analyze exhibit goers’ responses and comments at different levels by combining visual arts theory and theories of nationalism and nation-building. I also describe the impact of the exhibit on the communities that hosted it, and attempt to answer the following questions: How do Turkish citizens define themselves in relation to an official definition of Turkishness? How does ethnic identity intersect national identity in modern Turkey? Finally, how do Turkish citizens respond to a portrait of their nation that is ethnically diverse? In other words, when Turks view a multicultural portrait of their nation, can they see themselves? My presentation will include music and digital images of Ebru’s photographs.

My paper examines changes in the conceptualization of, and the debates surrounding work, leisure and laziness in the last century of the Ottoman Empire (1839-1920), when the Ottoman state’s functions were expanding and modernizing. As a part of a larger project on the emergence and development of the discourse and practice of work, I investigated how the content of these notions changed and became social and “national” issues, and how their new meanings were played out on various levels and areas of society, such as in Ottoman state reforms, in the formation of political identities, and in cultural production, particularly literature. In this paper, along with an overview of reforms targeting Ottoman governmental bureaus in Istanbul examining the state’s attempts to order and reorder the work and leisure of its employees, I mainly focus on the cultural products (such as novels, popular magazines and political periodicals) of nineteenth-century Ottoman literati and intelligentsia. The issues of laziness and the wasting of time, which bore the stigma of hindering modernization and industrialization, were targeted not only by the state to determine the parameters of a good and productive citizen but also by various political groups. The members of opposing ideological camps employed these terms both in their opposition to state policies, and in their attacks against each other’s visions of modernity. The major publications of ‘Westernists’, ‘Islamists,’ and ‘nationalists’ show that a common social enemy of these groups was the popular habits perceived to inhibit productivity and promote laziness. However, although sharing the major assumptions of a modern discourse of work, all these groups formulated a different vision of what constituted modernity. Lazy, in its implications, became a political label that these different political groups used to denigrate each others’ approach to the reforms. The Ottoman novels provided a salient setting for the new discourse on work and productivity by creating ‘super-westernized’ anti-heroes and industrious heroes. The novels opened up new fields of negotiation and cultural struggle for their different conceptualizations of what constituted modern, who ought to be labeled useless for the ‘Ottoman nation’, and who were to be regarded lazy, idle and industrious. Thus, these concepts took divergent courses that were not intended by the state reforms. Constantly resisted against, defined and redefined through multiple perspectives of the historical players of the period, the ideas on idleness, laziness and work provide us keys to understanding the specificities of Ottoman modernity.