Endorsements:

"Hochberg's political realism is supplemented with a specifically literary hope that reading can not only undo the effects of forgetting but expose the complex ties that bind Arab and Jew. Hochberg dares to articulate a shared history on the basis of a patient, copious, and persuasive reading of Arab and Jewish writers and critics, many of whom are not well understood by Anglophone readers. Through a disorientingly lucid, close, and provocative set of readings, she shows us that the cultural imagination has its crucial place in articulating the prospects for peace. She makes good on the claim that memory is crucial to imagining anew."
—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

"Hochberg's book is a poignant and rigorous demonstration of the power of literature to provide a space of cohabitation and confrontation that is an alternative to 'the logic of partition.' An important and timely intervention that will be of interest to all those who seek ways out of the impasses created by racial, cultural, religious, or political differences."
—Françoise Lionnet, University of California, Los Angeles




Oct. 14, 6 pm: Conversations on the Middle East: Israel/Palestine with Gil Hochberg, presented by Saree Makdisi

On Sunday, Oct. 14, 6 pm, UCLA comparative literature professor Gil Hochberg will present her new book, In Spite of Partition, which takes issue with the "myth of separation" of Arabs and Jews. She argues that despite the Wall and other attempts to drive Palestinians and Israelis apart, the idea of separating Jews and Arabs along ethnic or national lines is flawed.

Indeed, challenging the widespread "separatist imagination" behind partition, Gil Hochberg demonstrates the ways in which works of contemporary Jewish and Arab literature reject simple notions of separatism and instead display complex configurations of identity that emphasize the presence of otherness within the self—the Jew within the Arab, and the Arab within the Jew. Her book examines Hebrew, Arabic, and French works that are largely unknown to English readers to reveal how, far from being independent, the signifiers "Jew" and "Arab" are inseparable.

In the Palestinian writer Anton Shammas's Hebrew novel Arabesques, the Israeli and Palestinian protagonists are a "schizophrenic pair" who "have not yet decided who is the ventriloquist of whom." And in the Moroccan Jewish writer Albert Swissa's Hebrew novel Aqud, the Moroccan-Israeli main character's identity is uneasily located between the "Moroccan Muslim boy he could have been" and the "Jewish Israeli boy he has become." Other examples draw attention to the intricate linguistic proximity of Hebrew and Arabic, the historical link between the traumatic memories of the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakbah, and the libidinal ties that bind Jews and Arabs despite, or even because of, their current animosity.

Gil Z. Hochberg is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

She will be introduced by her colleague, Lebanese-Palestinian-American scholar and writer Saree Makdisi. Makdisi is the author of Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity and William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Makdisi, also a prolific writer on politics, will publish his third book on Palestine, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, with Norton next year. He has written in publications ranging from Studies in Romanticism, the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Race and Imperial Culture, and the Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830, to the South Atlantic Quarterly, Boundary 2, Critical Inquiry, and the London Review of Books.

Of In Spite of Partition he writes: "This book is a testimony to the healing power of literature, its capacity to resist the mutilating logic of a social and political world whose realities it refuses simply to mirror. It deserves to be read by anyone who has the courage to imagine that underlying a conflict played out on a landscape disfigured by separating barriers, hideous walls, and strangling checkpoints, there persists the quintessentially human desire to reunite what has been separated, to share, to be equal, to be in common-and even to love." —Saree Makdisi

All are welcome to attend. Copies of the book will be available for signing by the author. Free to the public. RSVPs are required as space is limited: call 310.657.5511.

Presented by Levantine Cultural Center, at Pacific Arts Center, 10469 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90025.