Ghostly Labor

Ethnic Classism in the Levantine Prism of Jacqueline Kahanoff's Jacob's Ladder

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8965231
AutoresAmr Tawfik Kamal (City College of New York, autor de correspondencia), Amr Kamal
Año2017
Volumen49
Número2
Páginas255-275
Fecha de publicación2017-04-20
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaInternational Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020743817000046
OpenAlexW2605898042
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas27

In her writings, the Egyptian-born Israeli author Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff advocated Levantine cosmopolitanism, which she dubbed Levantinism, as a unique cultural model particular to the Eastern Mediterranean. Through an analysis of Kahanoff's novel Jacob's Ladder (1951), this article questions the nostalgic image often associated with Egyptian cosmopolitanism. I argue that this text provides rare insight into the process through which Levantine culture developed amid several competing imperial and nationalist projects. In particular, I show how the novel's depiction of Levantine spaces documents the marginalized role of the working class in the education of elite Levantine society and its acquisition of cultural capital. My analysis also explores how the construction and sustenance of a celebrated image of the Levantine past depended on the racialization of labor, or what I call “ethnic classism.” Through this latter process, a labor force made up of other cosmopolitan subjects was Orientalized and relegated to the background where it served to highlight a European-like Levantine cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism · Elite · Ethnic group · Political science · Politics · Prism · Race (biology · Racialization · Sociology · Spectacle · Sustenance · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society