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This book historically surveys the contested poetics of space and place associated with the term "homeland" in the Middle East, Balkans, Ireland, South Africa and Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These cases of contested homeland discourses are contrasted with a case of non-contention in Sweden. The contributors do not narrate events preceding the conflicts in these divisive areas of the world, they offer and confront representations of homeland from multiple and, at times, unusual perspectives. Ambiguity and variety are one common denominator of this very uncommon collection. These scholarly representations of homeland are saturated with the contradictions of imagination and culture. They all contain a subtext concerning the role of the nation state and its relationships to multiple understandings of homeland in contemporary global cultures and politics. The different and sometimes incompatible opinions voiced here are bound by a common hope to affect the current discourse on nationalism, community, homeland and exile.
List of contents
Contents: Ron Robin/Bo Stråth: Poetics of Space and Place - Rema Hammami: Gender, Nakbe and Nation: Palestinian Women's Presence and Absence in the Narration of 1948 Memories - Salim Tamari: Bourgeois Nostalgia and Exilic Narratives - Karma Nabulsi: My Homeland - Issam Nassar: Narrating a Homeland Identity: The Writing of the Histories of Palestinian Nationalism - Ilan Gur Ze'ev: Holocaust/Nakbah as an Israeli/Palestinian Homeland - Fania Oz-Salzberger: Oh, My Land, My Homeland: Origins, Varieties and Fate of Zionist Poetics of Moledet - Maoz Azaryahu: Homelandscapes. Zionist Landscapes of a Hebrew Homeland: Three Cases - Mark Levine: Locating Home: Overthrowing Geography, Misreading Modernity and Other Adventures in the Search of the Routes that Divide Us - Ilan Pappe: The Post-Territorial Dimensions of a Future Homeland in Israel and Palestine - Ron Robin: The Necropolitics of Homeland. The Role of Tombs and Village Cemetries in the Middle East Conflict - Mariangela Veikou: Ambiguous Insiders and the Description of «Homeland»: Belonging in Immigrants' Ethnic Identity Narratives - Senadin Musabegovic: The Circle and the Present - Heidi Grunebaum/Yazir Henri: Where the Mountain Meets Its Shadow: A Conversation on Memory, Identity, and Fragmented Belonging in Present-Day South Africa - John D. Brewer: Contesting Ulster - Rolf Petri: The Meanings of Heimat (1850-1945) - James Kaye: There's No Place Like Home - Bo Stråth: Hembygd as a Pragmatic Concept: The Alternative Case.
About the author
The Editors: Ron Robin is Professor of History the University of Haifa. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is
The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex. Bo Stråth is Professor of Contemporary History at the European University Institute, Florence. He has published widely on issues of modernity and democracy in Europe, in a historical and a comparative perspective.
