Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism Thuy Linh Tu, chair, Rajinia Srikanth, and Pamela Thoma Keith Feldman's Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America is one of the first attempts to write a cultural and intellectual history of the United States' "special relationship" with Israel. Drawing on an impressive array of texts--journal writings, literature, poetry, newspapers and government documents—Feldman offers a detailed analysis of the investments in "Israel-Palestine" by a diverse set of constituencies, including: Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims, civil rights liberals, black radicals, and neoconservative policy-makers. The meaning of "Israel-Palestine" has, Feldman argues, historically been complex, but such varied and at times conflicted views have been largely hidden by the institutional weight of U.S. political and economic interests in the region—interests that are themselves rooted in ideas about race, civilization, and American destiny and security. Shadow over Palestine is a remarkable addition to work on "cultures of U.S. imperialism." Timely and persuasive, it offers a model for understanding the transnational shape of U.S. domestic culture in the post-WWII period, and is an exemplar of comparative approaches to the study of race and ethnicity. Among its important insights, the book reveals how representations of the region—including narratives of "civilization' and "terror"—helped to sustain domestic racial ideologies and racialized conditions of segregation, border policing, and poverty, among others. It insists, in other words, on understanding contemporary debates about war, freedom, imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalism--and their resistance--as central to U.S. race making and vice-versa. These are questions and concerns that have long animated the field of Asian American Studies. Feldman's work outlines the long and intertwined history of U.S. racial formation and centralizes a geopolitical framing that [End Page 461] reminds us of Asian American Studies' core commitments. At the same time, it challenges the field to reconsider the scope and implications of Asian American political and intellectual discourses and outlines an urgent shift via a rethinking of racial formation in the Cold War. The work forges a vision for an alternative political trajectory with deft and subtlety, a remarkable accomplishment for any scholarship and especially commendable in an early career contribution. For these reasons, the committee commends Keith Feldman's Shadow Over Palestine. Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press

Civilization · Destiny (ISS module · Ideology · Literary criticism · Literature · Manifest destiny · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society