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List of contents
Introduction: Exile at the Origin
Chapter 1 – “A Patch of Ground Between Four Tent Pegs”
Chapter 2 – The Second Commandment in the Second Empire
Chapter 3 – Liberal Pluralism and the Mourning Work of Assimilation
Chapter 4 – ‘Wherever you go you will be a polis”: Hannah Arendt via Rahel Varnhagen
Chapter 5 – Posthumous Place: W.G. Sebald and the Problem of Landscape
Epilogue: Exile as Source and Resource
About the author
Jessica Dubow is Reader in Cultural Geography at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and the author of Settling the Self: Colonial Space, Colonial Identity and the South African Landscape (2009). She has also published in numerous leading journals including: Critical Inquiry, New German Critique, Art History, The Journal of Visual Culture, Comparative Literature and Parallax .
Summary
In In Exile, Jessica Dubow situates exile in a new context in which it holds both critical capacity and political potential. She not only outlines the origin of the relationship between geography and philosophy in the Judaic intellectual tradition; but also makes secular claims out of Judaism’s theological sources.
Analysing key Jewish intellectual figures such as Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, Dubow presents exile as a form of thought and action and reconsiders attachments of identity, history, time, and territory. In her unique combination of geography, philosophy and some of the key themes in Judaic thought, she has constructed more than a study of interdisciplinary fluidity. She delivers a striking case for understanding the critical imagination in spatial terms and traces this back to a fundamental – if forgotten – exilic pull at the heart of Judaic thought.
Foreword
Taking exile as her central theme, Jessica Dubow draws on Judaism’s own philosophical and theological sources to explore how ideas of spatial displacement form the basis of a specifically Judaic critical consciousness.
Additional text
In beautifully evocative prose, the author offers the fresh voice of a cultural geographer to the analysis of secular Jewish thought. In doing so, Dubow gifts us with a genuinely novel approach to the dialectics of secularism and theology. This book opens our understanding of the space that exile can carve out for intellectual creativity.
