Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities

Modern urban spaces are, by definition, mixed socio-spatial configurations. In many ways, their enduring success and vitality lie in the richness of their ethnic texture and ongoing exchange of economic goods, cultural practices, political ideas and social movements. This mixture, however, is rarely harmonious and has often led to violent conflict over land and identity. Focusing on mixed towns in Israel/Palestine, this insightful volume theorizes the relationship between modernity and nationalism and the social dynamics which engender and characterize the growth of urban spaces and the emergence therein of inter-communal relations. For more than a century, Arabs and Jews have been interacting in the workplaces, residential areas, commercial enterprises, cultural arenas and political theatres of mixed towns. Defying prevailing Manichean oppositions, these towns both exemplify and resist the forces of nationalist segregation. In this interdisciplinary volume, a new generation of Israeli and Palestinian scholars come together to explore ways in which these towns have been perceived as utopian or dystopian and whether they are best conceptualized as divided, dual or colonial. Identifying ethnically mixed towns as a historically specific analytic category, this volume calls for further research, comparison and debate.

Autorentext

Dr Daniel Monterescu, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest. Dan Rabinowitz is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University.

Inhalt

Introduction: The Transformation of Urban Mix in Palestine/Israel in the Modern Era; 1: History, Representation and Collective Memory; 1: Bourgeois Nostalgia and the Abandoned City; 2: 'The Arabs Just Left': Othering and the Construction of Self amongst Jews in Haifa Before and After 1948 1; 3: "We Were Living in a Different Country": Palestinian Nostalgia and the Future Past 1; 4: Cross-National Collective Action in Palestine's Mixed Towns: The 1946 Civil Servants Strike 1; 5: How is a Mixed Town to be Administered? Haifa's Municipal Council, 1940-1947; 2: Spatial Dynamics: Ethnic Urban Mix and its Contradictions; 6: Planning, Control and Spatial Protest: The Case of the Jewish-Arab Town of Lydd/Lod 1; 7: Heteronomy: The Cultural Logic of Urban Space and Sociality in Jaffa; 8: A Nixed, not Mixed, City: Mapping Obstacles to Democracy in the Nazareth/Natzerat Illit Conurbation; 9: Exit From the Scene: Reflections on the Public Space of the Palestinians in Israel; 3: Gendered Perspectives on Mixed Spaces; 10: Contested Contact: Proximity and Social Control In Pre-1948 Jaffa and Tel-Aviv; 11: Mixed Cities as a Place of Choice: The Palestinian Women's Perspective; 4: Cultural Encounters and Civil Society; 12: Cooperation and Conflict in the Zone of Civil Society: Arab-Jewish Activism in Jaffa; 13: Nationalism, Religion and Urban Politics in Israel: Struggles Over Modernity and Identity in 'Global' Jaffa; 14: Mixed as in Pidgin: The Vanishing Arabic of a "Bilingual" City