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Feldman, Keith. "Racing the Question: Israel/Palestine and U.S. Imperial Culture," English, Washington State University, August 2008. Advisor: Alys Eve Weinbaum and Nikhil Pal Singh
This dissertation explores how representations of Israel/Palestine became lodged in contemporary United States imperial culture. From the figure of the city on the hill forward, these representations produced a variety of settler-colonial and messianic narratives.
In the early post-civil rights period (1963-1978), a wide range of culture workers augmented these narratives to codify, clarify, and contest shifts in U.S. race-making. Drawing on the
work of Foucault, Du Bois, and Said, I reveal how post-civil rights representations of Israel/Palestine and permanent war both informed and challenged the racial logic of neoconservatism, the ghettoization of African Americans, and the growing demonization of Arabs and Palestinians.
Chapter One traces the long cultural history shaping American visions of the Holy Land and Israel/Palestine. I propose the term destinarian exceptionalism to capture the
ideological join formed by claims of American and Zionist national uniqueness and their production of exceptional racialized spaces and subjects. Chapter Two analyzes how several Jewish American intellectuals and their interlocutors (Podhoretz, Moynihan, Kahane, Bellow, and Waskow) linked representations of the June 1967 War to domestic social struggle and
the Nazi holocaust that obscured the complicity of liberalism and racism. I argue that claims to Jewish universalism in the U.S. (Jewish assimilation epitomizing the universal values of American pluralism) and Jewish particularism in Israel (Jewish uniqueness epitomizing the necessity for Israel) operated through a relationship of historical reciprocity, revealing an enduring transnational racial geography. Chapter Three argues that Black Power movements
produced an imaginative geography that linked critique of imperial race-making processes and struggles for freedom in the U.S., Palestine, and Israel. These works (by SNCC, Black Panthers, and David Graham Du Bois) departed from the Afro-diasporic Zionism informing earlier black politics by representing the colonial conditions shaping Palestinian life. Chapter Four considers how Palestinian culture work circulating in the U.S. gained a fugitive legibility in the wake of the 1967 War. It locates the emergence of Said’s Orientalism in counterpoint
to Arab American intellectual production, Foucault’s Tunisian experience of the 1967 War, the racial fetishization of Kahlil Gibran, and the popularized construction of the Arab
terrorist.
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