Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary

Description

Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs charts the aesthetic and political formation of neoliberalism and globalization in Israeli and Palestinian literature from 1945 to the present. By tracking literature's move from making worlds to reading signs, Dr. Cohen Lustig proposes a new way to read theorize our global contemporary. Dr. Kfir Cohen Lustig argues that the period of Israeli statehood and its counterpart of Palestinian statelessness produced works that sought to make and create whole worlds - create the new nation of Israel, preserve collective visions of Palestinian statehood. During the period of neoliberalism, the period after 1985 in Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords in Palestine, literature became about the reading of signs, about individual subjects involved in private lives. Following in the tradition of his mentor Fredric Jameson, Cohen argues for new ways to track the subjectivities and aesthetics produced by larger shifts in production. In so doing, he proposes a new model to understand the historical development of Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as world literature in our contemporary moment. With a preface from Fredric Jameson.

Kfir Cohen Lustig is a Senior Research Fellow and Academic Director of the Globalization and Sovereignty Cluster at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

It is refreshing to read an analysis of Israeli and Palestinian literatures that centers not on identity - national, religious, ethnic, or gender - but rather on the effects of capitalism on politics and culture. -- Danielle Drori * Los Angeles Review of Books * Cohen Lustig has identified a historical trend, and he presents a solid analysis supporting his argument. The historical-theoretical undertaking in this book is both thorough and a joy to read. This work is a worthy and novel contribution to the library of Palestinian historical and literary studies. * Journal of Palestine Studies *