This meticulous collection of essays, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, provides a welcome overview of Ella Shohat’s astute contributions to postcolonial thought. Rather than being chronologically ordered, the essays are orchestrated around a number of salient themes in Shohat’s work over a span of twenty years. Shohat is a “calculatedly undisciplined” scholar who engages diverse fields including literary, media, and cultural studies, philosophy, historiography, sociology, anthropology, geography, archeology, medicine, and biology (xv). Her essays deftly combine theoretical frameworks such as “historical materialism, textual psychoanalysis, semiological narratology, [and] deconstructive poststructuralism” to advance a “postcolonial, multicultural, or transnational feminism” (xv). Shohat’s multifaceted analyses of empire, gender, race, and Eurocentric nationalisms, all of which deepen our knowledge of the field, appear in more recent books such as Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (co-authored with Robert Stam), yet the essays in this earlier volume foreshadow current intellectual trends and controversial political debates that testify to her trailblazing and fearless scholarship.

The collection includes Shohat’s trademark pieces such as “Notes on the Post-Colonial” and a modified version of “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews,” along with newer and perhaps uncharacteristic works such as “ ‘Lasers for Ladies’: Endo Discourse and the Inscriptions of Science,” which delivers an historical reading of medical images to reveal how scientific discourses (re)define racialized and gendered norms. Readers unfamiliar with Shohat’s writings will appreciate the first essay, which establishes the vast historical and geopolitical terrain that informs her nuanced “relational” approach to theorizing culture and identities. Relationality, as advanced by Shohat, emphasizes “the horizontal and vertical links that thread communities and histories together in a conflictual network … [it] operates at once within, between, and beyond the nation-state framework [and] calls attention to the conflictual, hybrid interplay of communities within and across borders” (207). The value of a relational analysis lies in its ability to link overlapping and contradictory discourses of resistance among diverse cultural groups, thereby enabling scholars to “transcend some of the politically debilitating effects of disciplinary and community boundaries”(207). Correspondingly, Shohat’s essays draw attention to the “strange affinities” and “unlikely alliances” among differently marginalized communities through shared histories and cultural practices (Hong and Ferguson; Smith).

Shohat’s critiques of humanism, Enlightenment thinking, Zionism, and settler-state colonialism have laid the groundwork for current activist scholarship and practices concerning, for example, the homonationalist “pinkwashing” of United States and Israeli nation-states, and global solidarity movements such as Arab Spring, Occupy, and Idle No More (Puar). To elaborate, various essays detail the invented hegemonic narrative of the modern Israeli nation-state to invoke parallels among unevenly disenfranchised Arab-Jews, Palestinians, Indigenous, and diasporic people of color in the Americas. Here, Shohat’s instrumental analytic of going beyond a nation-state framework productively theorizes intersecting and transnational grids of power and enables us to rethink contemporary tensions among disparately marginalized communities.

Shohat’s ongoing claim that the “post” in “post-colonial” remains incongruous in relation to Indigenous peoples warrants further exploration of non-Western and specifically Indigenous epistemologies that offer viable alternatives to hierarchical and Eurocentric modes of social organization.Footnote ¹ In line with Shohat’s compelling essay on Franz Fanon’s revolutionary writings against the backdrop of Enlightenment discourses, the book ends with a sobering reflection on the problematic “post-Zionist” reception of Edward Said’s translated writings in Israel and the United States. Both essays demonstrate Shohat’s profound ability to articulate uneven, contradictory, and shifting relations of power and privilege in different geopolitical contexts. Other notable essays examine the cinematic representations of Cleopatra, highlight undertheorized interventions of post–Third World feminist filmmakers, and uncover repressed or “taboo” histories of the Mizrahim (Arab-Jews).

Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices invites scholars to trace additional examples of non-Western cultural production in nonrelativist and rigorously contextualized ways. Overall, the book succeeds in its promise to “foreground postcolonial, diasporic, transnational, and feminist issues” and highlights “the ways in which visual culture shapes the (re)production of knowledge” (xiv). Due to its theoretical sophistication, the book is best suited for advanced undergraduate and graduate-level cultural studies and postcolonial theories courses. It is highly recommended for feminist film and media courses, which, as Shohat indicates, tend to evacuate questions of imperialism and race.