Ella Shohat’s Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices is a collection of essays written largely over a two-decade period spanning the 1980s and 1990s. Shohat contributed prolifically to discussions in the emerging knowledge domains of multiculturalism, postcolonial studies, and transnational feminisms; moreover, she did so in a rigorous and self-conscious manner, always probing the new paradigms in a critical way. The essays here record this engagement with transformations in the North American academy over the past couple of decades, and they demonstrate the work of an author who has vigilantly critiqued the post-Enlightenment legacies of an enduring Eurocentricism. Indeed, the collection functions as a window onto the issues and dilemmas confronted by an interdisciplinary cultural studies since the late 1980s, namely, the concerns raised by multiculturalism, transnational feminism, diaspora, and postcolonialism. However, the larger accomplishment of the volume is that it reveals a pioneering mode of cultural criticism that may be definitively viewed as a “post-orientalist” practice of knowledge.

The opening essay, “Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge,” sets up a number of Shohat’s recurring themes, particularly that of “multiculturalizing the curriculum,” which served as a central thread in two previous books, Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminisms in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) and, with Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentricism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). In this essay, she examines some of the tensions between ethnic studies, queer studies, area studies, and women’s studies, emphasizing their institutional make-up and points of connection and separation in the academy. For Shohat, knowledge is a “permeable interwoven relationality” (2) existing in maps and mobilities and pursuable through the global travel of images, texts, and ideas. But it is also implicated in distinct ways within the hierarchies and internal ideological struggles of the institution. Her attentiveness to both these expressions is perhaps best represented by her widely cited essay, “Notes on the Postcolonial,” which interrogated the meaning of this term—its agencies, elisions, possibilities, and slippages—at the point of its historical interpolation into English departments across the United States. Connecting the emergence of postcolonial criticism to a crisis in “Third World” thinking, on the one hand, and the rise of poststructuralist theory, on the other, Shohat’s essay probed the critical paradigm in ways new at the time, and became part of the canon of postcolonial studies and the scholarly dialogue it generated across disciplines.

Is there a discernible intellectual trajectory in these essays? For Shohat, this is not necessarily the goal of the volume. The essays were selected to express a wide variety of theoretical concerns and an interest in “the ways in which visual culture shapes the (re)production of knowledge” (xiv). Several of the essays—including “The Cinema after Babel,” “Sacred Word, Profane Image,” and “Disorienting Cleopatra”—reflect her concern with film and, in particular, with performing what she calls a “feminist ethnography of cinema” (17). That is the subtitle of an essay developed during the 1980s and published here as “Gender and the Culture of Empire,” in which Shohat turns to the pervasive Orientalist tropes that exist within the culture of Hollywood cinema. Arguing for the “crucial role of sexual difference” for the culture of empire, she examines the pictorial landscape of the “discovery” of America—a thoroughly gendered imagery of possession and penetration—and juxtaposes it with cinematic counternarratives like the Brazilian film, How Tasty Was My Frenchman (1971). Another essay, “Post-Third Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation and the Cinema,” extends this concern with counternarratives by bringing together a diverse range of experimental film and video projects by women in such places as Tunisia, Egypt, India, and Morocco, along with artists and filmmakers like Julie Dash, Coco Fusco, Tracey Moffat, Renee Green, and Mona Hatoum (among those better known in a North American context). What does this huge swathe of creative energy have in common, and why should we conceive of such wide-ranging practices together? For Shohat, they display a “multicultural feminist aesthetics of resistance,” one that bears witness to “a collective memory of colonial violence and postcolonial displacement” (324). While acknowledging the danger of collapsing these practices into a single easy or uniform aesthetic, Shohat nonetheless persuades readers to hear in this landscape the “layered dissonant identities” of diasporic feminist subjects (324).

Another essay, “Lasers for Ladies,” which investigates medical discourses that visualize the interior of the body (such as x-ray, ultrasound, and video laparoscopy), appears upon first glance to be unrelated in spite of its concern with “the visual” in the loosest possible sense. And yet, Shohat’s account of what she calls “endo-discourse,” namely, the female subject’s encounter with endometriosis, shows her sharp eye for the parallel complexities of culture in vastly different texts. Always conscious of the categories of race in North America, Shohat shows how “endo-discourse” has different implications for black and white women, linked as it is to racialized assumptions about sexuality, fertility, and female reproduction. With video laparoscopy, the notion of scientific discovery symbolically replays some of the discourses witnessed in Hollywood cinema: in both arenas, we see a technological expansion into a “virgin land” of the interior of the female body guided by a penetrating gaze. Shohat thus links the disturbing experience of a medical encounter with video laparoscopy and endo-discourse with the symbolic violence of the larger cultural picture, and asks of this alienating confrontation: what are the implications for female subjectivity and identification when a female spectator watches the “inside of a body on the screen that happens to be her own?” (157)

The questions Shohat raises about the “boundaries of belonging” and the emergence of “different geographies of identity” become most urgent in her writing on the historical and contemporary ruptures between Israel and the Arab world. These are the “taboos” in her title with the most painful repercussions, not only for the Arab populations of Palestine, but also for the longstanding Arab-Jewish culture that existed before the founding of Israel in 1948. The minority group of Sephardi (or in Israel, Mizrahi) Jews, to which Shohat belongs, has a unique history of double displacement: expelled from Spain in 1492, they have since been dispossessed by both Israel and the Arab world (from places like Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus) as a result of the modern redrawing of political maps. In the example of the colonial raid on the Jewish Egyptian Geniza “archive” (less an archive in the Foucauldian sense than a palimpsest of historical languages and documents), Shohat shows how alliances and oppositions between European Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardi Arab-Jews evolved to create a new landscape of identity-in-difference that suffocated much of the preexisting histories. For Shohat, the Israeli and Arab denial of the existence of the Arab-Jew—the “hybrid, the in-between”—is part of the “devastating consequences of the Zionist-Orientalist binary of East/West, Arab vs. Jew” (208). Her efforts to identify and articulate these cultural and historical processes have helped lay the ground for a “Mizrahi Studies,” which is not as narrow a field as it sounds, but is rather an intervention into the bigger picture of historical relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The great strength of Shohat’s work in this area is that it confronts the most pressing questions of our time through the rigorous and complex particularities of the Mizrahi experience as a “relational inquiry,” in her terms. She asks: How have the identities of Muslims, Christians, and Jews been constituted and reconstellated at different historical junctures? And what are their implications for nationalist ideologies and the legacies of colonial and postcolonial partitions? Needless to say, these are much more than academic questions, and Shohat confronts them fearlessly.

The final essay in the collection, “The ‘Postcolonial’ in Translation: Reading Edward Said between English and Hebrew,” deals with the reception of Said in Israel and, more generally, the lack of anti-colonial literature in Hebrew. Unfortunately, it is the only one that speaks to the politics of culture in a post-9/11 world. The essay left this reader wishing that more of Shohat’s penetrating pieces were specifically directed to current conjunctures of violence and global crisis. As an essayist, she has a knack for constructing a platform of inquiry through a prism of complexities and interrelationships, and for scrutinizing a given phenomenon of culture along multiple axes, investments, and stakes. These qualities make this a valuable book, and we may hope that more from Shohat is in the works.