ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses expanded from the power-knowledge nexus of representation to include academic practice, structures and culture. Many studies focus on orientalist criticism or on everyday academic capitalism, and the studied field manifests a complex overdetermination of both ideologies, as being poised at the junction of academia and mizraḥanut. Opening up the study, as well as taking a transdisciplinary approach, meant reconsidering existing concepts and navigating between different expectations and theoretical and empirical concepts from a variety of scholarly traditions. The unequivocal power and resourcefulness of the security apparatuses and securitist ideology in Israel was/is such that academics had/have limited ability to resist it. The turn of the millennium saw several Hebrew publications engaging with Israel and mizrahanut through the prism of orientalism. Publicity and public appeal were also analysed in a common and vague narrative of carrying a unique mizrahanist public mission.
