Space in Modern Hebrew Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Grumberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Gaston Bachelard ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Spatial Configurations ◽  
Hebrew Culture ◽  
The City

The complex relationship between space and modern Hebrew literature proceeds from key spatial paradigms of the Hebrew Bible: Egypt, the desert, and Zion. Over centuries, Jews dispersed around the globe used Hebrew to express different modes of spatial engagement: rabbis considered the places and placelessness of God; medieval Andalusian poets longed for Zion; communist Jews in Baghdad and Jewish polyglots in Odessa used Hebrew to narrate their relationship to places their families inhabited for generations; Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians, in an era when Hebrew is no longer the sole purview of Jews, share Hebrew to reflect on homeland and diaspora in poetry and prose. Though “space” is by no means a novel phenomenon, the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences offered scholars of Hebrew culture conceptual and theoretical tools for addressing the diverse spatial configurations they encountered. The theorization of space and place in literature emphasized their active role in social relations and called for new conceptualizations of the construction and subversion of identities. Works by Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Edward Said, Edward Soja, and Yi-Fu Tuan, among others, have undergirded investigations of space and place in modern Hebrew literature. Because most of the critical work on space in Hebrew literature addresses Hebrew texts from the 20th century, this entry focuses on this period, though it also provides citations of scholarship analyzing biblical, rabbinic, Andalusian, and Haskalah texts. The citations mostly refer to literary texts but also include spatial analyses in cultural studies and history contexts. While many of the texts cited address the nation and territory or, alternatively, spatial paradigms that coalesce in resistance to the national, others investigate spatial paradigms in Hebrew that circumvent the national to consider fluid spatialities such as diaspora, migration, transnationalism, and travel, as well as historical spatial configurations that exist as memories, dreams, or specters. The preponderance of concrete investigations of specific places such as the city, the desert, and the kibbutz indicates the materiality of much of Hebrew literary spatiality. As the final section on modernity demonstrates, the spatial has opened fruitful avenues of inquiry within the existing historical discourse on Hebrew culture. There is, inevitably, some overlap in these categories: entries under The City, for example, might feel at home under Modernism and Place, while the line demarcating Borders and Beyond is appropriately penetrable, bleeding into Spatialities of Center and Margins. Finally, this entry should by no means be taken to represent all the scholarship on space in modern Hebrew literature, but rather to provide a sense of significant contributions and recent research.

Mapping and Spatial Studies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Ewalt
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Spatial Organization ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Spatial Studies ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Communication Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Practice

Critical communication studies of space and place consider the ways power becomes located within a wider topography of social relations. How a body thinks, its exposure to pollutants, or access to societal resources: these all depend, in part, upon where that body moves in relation to the other bodies that share their historical moment. The logic of power becomes manifest in the spatial organization of a society, and subsequently influences social practice. Emergent from multiple intellectual traditions—including humanistic geography, the spatial turn in the critical humanities, and postcolonial theory—spatial studies understand space and place as the product of social relations and maintain a critical, de-essentializing politics: Spaces are always being made and remade with consequences for marginalized populations. Moreover, as sites of public identification, certain spaces and places (a national park landscape or urban park) are imbued with epideictic significance. In order to understand and critique the relationship between communication, space, and place, scholars employ a number of concepts, many of which they share with neighboring fields, including mobility, globalization, affect, imagined geographies, place-making, critical regionalism, heterotopia, omnitopia, and memory places. Scholars of space and place, moreover, remain committed to mapping both as method and object of analysis. If a society’s spatial logic (who and what resides where and with what consequences) provides insight into power and subjugation, then mapping offers a potentially useful critical methodological practice. At the same time, mapping remains a technology of colonialism, a way of seeing space that stabilizes its movements and continues to enable colonial domination. Thus, critical communication scholars of space and place also analyze and critique the rhetoric of mapping, analyzing both the ways in which maps are used to uphold operations of domination as well as those “countermapping” efforts that employ and subvert the history of cartography towards more emancipatory ends.

scholarly journals Interrupting separateness, disrupting comfort: An autoethnographic account of lived religion, ubuntu and spatial justice

2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Eliastam
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Spatial Configurations ◽  
The Relationship

This article uses a fictionalised encounter as the basis for an autoethnographic exploration of the intersections between the South African social value of ubuntu and the notion of spatial justice. Ubuntu describes the interconnectedness of human lives. It asserts that a person is only a person through other people, a recognition that calls for deep respect, empathy and kindness. Ubuntu is expressed in selfless generosity and sharing. The spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities has resulted in a concern with the relationship between space and justice. It recognises that space is not simply an empty container in which people live and act, but is something that is constructed by social relations – and simultaneously constitutive of them. While this recognition gives rise to spatial perspectives on justice, what constitutes spatial, justice, as distinct from other notions of justice, and how such justice is to be achieved are contested. Building on the work of legal scholar, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, on spatial justice, I argue that the notion of ubuntu is able to shape our understanding of spatial justice, and when practised, it is able to disrupt space and challenge dominant spatial configurations.

Reading the Arabian Nights in Modern Hebrew Literature: Judaism, Arabness and the City

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-253
Author(s):  
Avi-ram Tzoreff
Keyword(s):  
Literary Genre ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
Oral Storytelling ◽  
Political Cooperation ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Potential Basis ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The City

Abstract The discourse about the Arabian Nights illustrates the ways through which hegemonic poetic and literary discourses crystallized themselves, while developing a set of distinctions as a yardstick for the estimation of literary works, as well as the connections between these various distinctions—namely ‘realistic’ and ‘fantastic’, East and West, and oral storytelling and folklore versus written literature. This article focuses on the discourse about the Arabian Nights in the field of modern Hebrew literature. In turning towards the collection, discussing it and translating some of its sections, the various characters who dealt with it expressed and promoted a cultural and political narrative which saw cultural affinities as a potential basis for broader political cooperation between Arabs and Jews. I will argue, however, that the discourse about the collection illustrates a process of modern Hebrew literature adopting a definition of itself as European and secular literature. I will also argue that the discourse on the Arabian Nights reveals the various directions taken by those who resisted the construal of modern Hebrew literature as a vector in the European- secular tradition. These counter-hegemonic assertions particularly took the form of arguments that the collection was a multifaceted cultural treasure that includes Hebrew layers, or, alternatively, representing it as a model of a modern literary genre, the city-centered anthology.

Theological Stains

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Assaf Shelleg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
Hebrew Culture ◽  
Late Modern

Theological Stains traces the growth of art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a riveting and provocative account, Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers grappling with biblical redemptive promises and diasporic patrimonies. Unveiling the network that bred territorial nationalism and Hebrew culture, Shelleg shows how this mechanism infiltrated composers’ work as much as it triggered less desirable responses from composers who sought to realize to the nonterritorial diasporic options Zionism has renounced. In the process, compositional aesthetics was stained by the state’s nationalization of the theological, by diasporism that refused redemption, and by Jewish musical traditions that permeated inaudibly into compositions written throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Accompanying this rich and dramatic story are equivalent developments in modern Hebrew literature and poetry alongside vast and previously unstudied archival sources. The book is also lavishly illuminated with 135 music examples that render it an incisive guide to fundamental chapters in modern and late modern art music.

Traditions of Translation in Hebrew Literature

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hebrew Culture ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Biblical Translation

The centrality of translation in the history of Hebrew literature cannot be overstated. Scholars of Hebrew translation history often attribute the fact that Hebrew writers have steadily relied on translation for enriching and sustaining the Hebrew literary canon to Hebrew’s long-standing existence in a state of diglossia or multiglossia: a condition in which a community habitually uses two or more languages or several forms of the same language for different purposes. Jewish communities from antiquity to the present have generally used Hebrew alongside other tongues, even after Hebrew’s reinvention as a modern vernacular, its so-called revival, in the 20th century. It is possible that Hebrew served as a vernacular in antiquity, but sufficient proof of this possibility has never surfaced. Nevertheless, in late-19th-century Eastern Europe, Jewish thinkers and lexicographers began promoting the idea of resuscitating Hebrew. They often articulated this goal through the metaphor and practice of translation, borrowing from European cultures the notion that every modern nation is defined by a shared vernacular, while also translating into Hebrew a cornucopia of texts—scientific, poetic, journalistic, and philosophical. This enabled those late-19th- and early-20th-century Jewish thinkers to enrich, expand, and test the limits of Hebrew in a modern context. If the modern Hebrew literary canon includes the Hebrew Bible, as many Hebrew writers and scholars believe, then it consists of the most frequently translated and widely circulated text in the world. Yet Biblical Hebrew differs from later formations of the language, and traditions of biblical translation in and outside the Jewish world call for separate bibliographies. The following bibliography focuses on central theoretical questions relating to traditions of translation in Hebrew literature, foregrounding the intensifying debates on Hebrew’s spiritual and national status from the 19th century onward. Translation has often served as a unique arena for such debates, acting as a vehicle for transforming Hebrew literature from within, while allowing for its venturing out. It has frequently allowed its practitioners to define the imaginary boundaries of Hebrew literature and delineate the contours of Hebrew culture as primarily Jewish-national.

How a Lingua Franca Spreads

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Mc Laughlin
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Dominant Language ◽  
Speakers Of Other Languages ◽  
Realistic View ◽  
Atlantic Language ◽  
The City

This chapter considers how Wolof, an Atlantic language spoken in Senegal, has become an important lingua franca, and how French has contributed to the ascent of Wolof. The nature of social relations between Africans and French in cities along the Atlantic coast in the 18th and 19th centuries were such that a prestigious urban way of speaking Wolof that made liberal use of French borrowings became the language of the city. As an index of urban belonging, opportunity, and modernity, Wolof was viewed as a useful language, a trend that has continued up to the present. Four case studies illustrate how the use of Wolof facilitates mobility for speakers of other languages in Senegal. By drawing a distinction between the formal and informal language sectors, this chapter offers a more realistic view of everyday language practices in Senegal, where Wolof is the dominant language.

Cyclopedia of Modern Hebrew Literature, Vol. I

1967 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Abraham I. Katsh ◽  
G. Kressel
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Modern Hebrew

Rural migrants in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China: Multi-positionality and negotiated living strategies

Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (10) ◽  
pp. 2245-2260 ◽  
Author(s):  
H Chung
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Rural Migrants ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

This paper investigates rural Chinese migrants’ agency through their multi-positionality and negotiated living strategies. The idea of ‘multi-positionality’ conceptualises a migrant’s mobility between physical locations and shifting social positions. Through individual migrants’ multi-positionality, this study discusses their place-specific social relations and thereby the diverse way to negotiate a living in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China. These strategies include simple approaches such as facilitating physical movements between different locations and more sophisticated ones which develop multiple roles with outsiders and native villagers in different localities. While the former allows individual migrants to use their local knowledge to make a living in the context of institutional exclusion and discrimination, the latter further cultivates changes and an upgrade in social relations. Rural migrants' everyday stories are used to unfold an individual’s particular people–place relationship and how he/she has tapped into a place-specific resource to make a living. It does not aim to generalise rural migrants’ experience; rather it seeks to show diversity and complexity. Migrants’ stories are collected through extensive research in a village-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China. Through these stories, not only does this paper articulate the social relations which underlie individual migrants’ shifting positions, but also extends translocal studies on migrants beyond the narrative of physical locations.

What is the Fjord City?

TERRITORIO ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 141-150
Author(s):  
Marius Grřnning
Keyword(s):  
Physical Space ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Cultural Orientation ◽  
Institutional Transformation ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Institutional Stability ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
New Policies ◽  
The City

Fjord City is the slogan for the development of the Oslo waterfront. What appears as a unified design is in reality a mosaic of interventions implemented gradually under different conditions. The 1980s were characterised by a cultural orientation to give priority to the urban centre in a climate of political polarisation, economic liberalism and institutional transformation. In the 1990's the state resumed an active role, in conditions offinancial crisis, launching new policies and new regulatory mechanisms. Norway re-established institutional stability in 2000 and Fjord City reflects the form of government that replaced the traditional model of social democratic planning. The organisation of decision-making for the development of the city are to be seen on this ground of interaction between physical space and the institutional sphere.

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