Description
This collection of essays explores the now mostly extinct notion of Semites. Invented in the nineteenth century and essential to the making of modern conceptions of religion and race, the strange unity of Jew and Arab under one term, Semite (the opposing term was Aryan), and the circumstances that brought about its disappearance constitute the subject of this volume. With a focus on the history of disciplines (including religious studies and Jewish studies), as well as on lingering political, theological, and cultural effects (secularism, anti-Semitism, Israel/Palestine), Semites: Race, Religion, and Literature turns to the literary imagination as the site of a fragile and tenuous alternative, the promise of something like a Semitic perspective.
Author: Gil Anidjar
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 10/08/2007
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.48lbs
Size: 8.55h x 5.62w x 0.47d
ISBN13: 9780804756952
ISBN10: 0804756953
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
About the Author
Gil Anidjar is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. He is the author of Our Place in Al-Andalus: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (Stanford, 2002) and the editor of Jacques Derrida's Acts of Religion (2002).