ABSTRACT
This book explores contemporary inflections of blackness in Israel and foreground them in the historical geographies of Europe, the Middle East, and North America. The contributors engage with expressions and appropriations of modern forms of blackness for boundary-making, boundary-breaking, and boundary-re-making in contemporary Israel, underscoring the deep historical roots of contemporary understandings of race, blackness, and Jewishness.
Allowing a new perspective on the sociology of Israel and the realm of black studies, this volume reveals a highly nuanced portrait of the phenomenon of blackness, one that is located at the nexus of global, regional, national and local dimensions. While race has been discussed as it pertains to Judaism at large, and Israeli society in particular, blackness as a conceptual tool divorced from phenotype, skin tone and even music has yet to be explored. Grounded in ethnographic research, the study demonstrates that many ethno-racial groups that constitute Israeli society intimately engage with blackness as it is repeatedly and explicitly addressed by a wide array of social actors.
Enhancing our understanding of the politics of identity, rights, and victimhood embedded within the rhetoric of blackness in contemporary Israel, this book will be of interest to scholars of blackness, globalization, immigration, and diaspora.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|35 pages
Background
chapter 2|15 pages
Jewishness, blackness and genetic data
part II|85 pages
Blackness in the Jewish Israeli society
part III|70 pages
Contested blackness
chapter 8|18 pages
“I am blacker than you”
chapter 9|18 pages
Black city 1
chapter 10|16 pages
Trajectories of soul citizenship
chapter 11|16 pages
Already black … and proud, and righteous
part IV|41 pages
Blackness and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict