Keith P. Feldman - Böcker

Winner, Best Book in Humanities and Cultural Studies (Literary Studies), Association for Asian American Studies Upon signing the first U.S. arms agreement with Israel in 1962, John F. Kennedy assured Golda Meir that the United States had a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East,comparable only to that of the United States with Britain. After more than five decades such a statement might seem incontrovertible-and yet its meaning has been fiercely contested from the start. A Shadow over Palestine brings a new, deeply informed, and transnational perspective to the decades and the cultural forces that have shaped sharply differing ideas of Israels standing with the United States-right up to the violent divisions of today. Focusing on the period from 1960 to 1985, author Keith P. Feldman reveals the centrality of Israel and Palestine in postwar U.S. imperial culture. Some representations of the region were used to manufacture commonsenseracial ideologies underwriting the conviction that liberal democracy must coexist with racialized conditions of segregation, border policing, poverty, and the repression of dissent. Others animated vital critiques of these conditions, often forging robust if historically obscured border-crossing alternatives. In this rich cultural history of the period, Feldman deftly analyzes how artists, intellectuals, and organizations-from the United Nations, the Black Panther Party, and the Association of Arab American University Graduates to James Baldwin, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Edward Said, and June Jordan-linked the unfulfilled promise of liberal democracy in the United States with the perpetuation of settler democracy in Israel and the possibility of Palestines decolonization. In one of his last essays, published in 2003, Edward Said wrote, In America, Palestine and Israel are regarded as local, not foreign policy, matters.A Shadow over Palestine maps this jagged terrain on which this came to be, amid a wealth of robust alternatives, and the undeterred violence at home and abroad unleashed as a result of this special relationship.

The Media Crease: Theorizing Culture, Repetition, and Social Difference brings together scholars from The Color of New Media working group at UC Berkeley to examine how patterns of repetition shape media, culture, technology, and social difference. Building on Abigail De Kosnik’s concept of the “media crease”—the traces of return, re-use, and re-engagement with media—contributors explore how new media and technology can entrench colonialism, racism, capitalism, and misogynoir, while also generating disruptive possibilities for resistance, creativity, and collective world-making. Essays analyze cultural and technological phenomena across diverse geographies, from Indigenous ceremony to AI, digital activism to hip-hop, archives to embodied performance. In doing so, the collection demonstrates how culture is made and remade through mediated repetition, and how communities marked by race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora leverage new media and technology to both endure oppressive structures and imagine alternative futures.