SECTION:
The Autobiography of the Other: powers of literary transference
MarkLeVine (University of California at Irvine)
Overthrowing Geographies of Exclusion: Arab-Jewish Relations in an Erstwhile WorldCityCan a culture of peace be built without a geography of peace, justice and reconciliation? This paper seeks to address this questions by examining how experiences and perceptions of the other in the space of the divided city of Tel Aviv-Yafo are shaped by the historically exclusivist yet expansionist geography of Tel Aviv and of Zionist and Palestinian nationalisms. It sees the space of the (pre-1948) sister cities of Tel Aviv and Jaffa as a metaphor for how nationalism, colonialism, capitalism and modernity intermingle in powerful ways and together shape identities that are structurally incapable of recognizing the "Other," especially when they are in fact so close to one's own identity. This is followed by an attempt to construct a "resistance geography" based on architectures of resistance - real and imaginary - of those most marginalized by the political economy and discursive regimes of the hegemonic Israeli state system.
I use a unique combination of literary, town-planning, and social historiographic sources to compose a complex narrative of every day life and its struggles in the space of Jaffa-Tel Aviv during the last eighty years. My conclusion is that these links must be kept at the forefront in trying to create a new mechanism for defining one's and one's others' identities, otherwise the systemic power of what i term the 'four-fold matrix' of modernity, nationalism, capitalism and colonialism will continue to suffocate alternative modes of identity construction and the potential solidarities that can flow from them.
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