Post-nationalist discourse is a discourse that, such as the new Israeli historians, does not share historical imagination with the ideology of nationalism and accordingly does not hold the nation-state as more than a product of certain socio-economic and cultural relations dominating a certain era. Thus, post-nationalist discourses on Israeli history and identity appear inherently critical of the Zionist perspective because they treat Zionism itself as a historical phenomenon. In this way historization of Zionism in the 1990s served to de-universalize Zionist civic values and resurrecting them as just an ideology amongst others.
The Israeli Memory Struggle analyzes changes of Israeli imaginations of history and identity through the 1990s. This particular decade of Israeli history was characterized by significant cultural clashes and vigorous debates over Jewish-Israeli history, identity, literature and not the least the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. The book provides thought provoking perspectives on issues related to the so-called post-Zionism debates and the globalization of Israeli society through the 1990s. It critically investigates the new Israeli historians, prominent authors of the 1990s, diasporic philosophy and Israel¹s 50th anniversary in
1998 in the shape of the TV documentary, Tekumah. Finally, the book discusses new tendencies in Israeli culture production that are suggestive to Jewish-Israeli identity in the age of globalization.
Located within the field of Cultural Studies, the book is highly theoretically engaged. It integrates the perspectives of cultural studies and post-colonial studies with a literary approach to historiography inspired by Hayden White and Richard Rorty. In the perspective of this book, histories are seen as working social institutions that set the parameters of what is real and common sense, on the one hand, and what is ideological and radical on the other. The book presents detailed theoretical investigations of the historical imagination as a social fact in an Israeli context.
Jakob Feldt is assistant professor of Middle Eastern Studies at University of Southern Denmark.
