[URBANTH-L]New Publication: Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities

[Daniel Monterescu]

Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities:
Historical Narratives, Spatial Dynamics, Gender Relations and
Cultural Encounters in Palestinian-Israeli Towns
 
Editors: Daniel Monterescu and Dan Rabinowitz
Series: Re-materialising Cultural Geography
 
Ashgate Publishing.http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=8863&edition_id=9433
 
Modern urban spaces are, by definition, mixed socio-spatial
configurations. In many ways, their enduring success and vitality
lie in the richness of their ethnic texture and ongoing exchange
of economic goods, cultural practices, political ideas and social
movements. This mixture, however, is rarely harmonious and has
often led to violent conflict over land and identity. Focusing on
mixed towns in Israel/Palestine, this insightful volume theorizes
the relationship between modernity and nationalism and the social
dynamics which engender and characterize the growth of urban
spaces and the emergence therein of inter-communal relations.
 
For more than a century, Arabs and Jews have been interacting in
the workplaces, residential areas, commercial enterprises,
cultural arenas and political theatres of mixed towns. Defying
prevailing Manichean oppositions, these towns both exemplify and
resist the forces of nationalist segregation. In this
interdisciplinary volume, a new generation of Israeli and
Palestinian scholars come together to explore ways in which these
towns have been perceived as utopian or dystopian and whether
they are best conceptualized as divided, dual or colonial.
Identifying ethnically mixed towns as a historically specific
analytic category, this volume calls for further research,
comparison and debate.
 
 
Contents
 
Preface; Introduction: the transformation of urban mix in
Palestine/Israel in the modern era, Dan Rabinowitz and Daniel
Monterescu; Part 1 History, Representation and Collective Memory:
Bourgeois nostalgia and the abandoned city, Salim Tamari; 'They
just left': Israeli Haifo'im grapple with the memory of
Palestinian Haifawi'yye, Dan Rabinowitz; 'We were living in a
different country': Palestinian nostalgia and the future past,
Jasmin Habib; Cross-national collective action in Palestine's
mixed towns: the 1946 civil servants strike, David de Vries; How
is a mixed city to be administered? Haifa's municipality at the
end of the British Mandate, Tamir Goren. Part 2 Spatial Dynamics:
Ethnic Urban Mix and its Contradictions: From urban panopticism
to spatial protest: the case of the 'mixed town' of Lydda, Haim
Yacobi; Heteronomy: the cultural logic of space in Jaffa, Daniel
Monterescu; A nixed not mixed town: social, cultural and
political trends in the Nazareth/Nazerat Illit conurbation,
Laurie King-Irani; Haifa: the politics of seeing, Ra'ef Zreik.
Part 3 Gendered Perspectives on Mixed Spaces: Contested contact:
proximity and social control in pre-1948 Jaffa and Tel-Aviv,
Debbie Bernstein; Mixed towns as places of choice: residential
preferences of Palestinian women, Hanna Herzog. Part 4 Cultural
Encounters and Civil Society: Ethnicized civil society:
discursive motifs in Jewish-Arab grassroots activism in Jaffa,
Amalia Sa'ar; Nationalism, religion and urban politics in Israel:
struggles over modernity and identity in 'global' Jaffa, Mark
Levine; Mixed as in pidgin: the vanishing Arabic of a bilingual
city, Anton Shammas; Index.
 
Reviews
'This excellent volume opens up an entirely new angle of vision
on relations among Jews and Palestinians in Israel. By exploring
the connections between urban space, nationhood, and modernity,
it treats so-called "mixed towns" as both a metaphor for and an
expression of the tensile sociology of the country at large.
Essential reading for anyone interested in the Middle East, past
and present.' Professor John Comaroff, University of Chicago, USA
 
 
 
About the Editors
 
Daniel Monterescu, Department of Sociology and Social
Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest. Dan
Rabinowitz, Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University.
 
 
 
 
 
 
--
Daniel Monterescu
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Central European University
& Marie Curie Fellow, EUI
 
http://web.ceu.hu/soc_ant/faculty/monterescu.htm
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