Life after Ruin
Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the landscape of Israel-Palestine was radically transformed. Breaking from conventional focus on explicit sites of violence and devastation, Noam Leshem turns critical attention to 'ordinary' spaces and places where the intricate and often intimate engagements between Jews and myriad Arab spaces takes place to this day. Leshem builds on interdisciplinary studies of space, memory, architecture and history, and exposes a rich archive of ideology, culture, political projects of state-building and identity formation. The result is a fresh look at the conflicted history of Israel-Palestine: a spatial history in which the Arab past isn't in fact separate, but inextricably linked to the Israeli present.
- Focuses on the Arab presence in modern-day Israeli landscapes
- Offers a history of the ideological, cultural and political projects of state-building and identity formation in Israel-Palestine
- Looks beyond formal state actions to understand the significance of everyday politics
Reviews & endorsements
'Life after Ruin provides a critical reading against any dichotomous view of spatial transformation in Palestine/Israel since 1948. It shows lucidly and in great detail the complexity and heterogeneity of spatial transformation in Palestine/Israel, revealing the power relations that shape this evolution on various levels. This narrative would be of interest to any student of Palestine/Israel.' Manar Makhoul, Die Welt des Islams
Product details
November 2018Paperback
9781316508244
252 pages
229 × 152 × 14 mm
0.4kg
12 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: tracing ruination
- 1. Toward a spatial history in Israel
- 2. Repopulating the emptiness: the spatiality and materiality of the overlooked
- 3. Fences and defences: spaces of emergency
- 4. On the road: from Salama to Kfar Shalem and back
- 5. Housing complex: between Arab houses and public tenaments
- 6. Sacred: the making and unmaking of a holy place
- Conclusion: histories of the rough and charmless.