personal memories revolutionary states and indian ocean migrations

settler’s feet are never visible,
except perhaps in the sea …The
town belonging to the colonized
people, or at least the native
town, the Negro village, the
medina, the reservation, is a place
of ill-fame, peopled by men of
evil repute. They are born there,
it matters little where and how
they die there; it matters not
where, nor how. It is a world
without spaciousness; men there
live on top of each other… The
native town is a crouching village,
a town on its knees, a town
wallowing in the mire. It is a
town of niggers and dirty Arabs.
LeVine’s intervention is not
strictly that of the revisionist school. He
is concerned with the question of
whether the colonized can ever be
modern and how modern history can be
written. He does so by looking at the
interstices, physical and discursive,
between the two cities. Neither Tel
Avivian nor Jaffan purity is what is
characteristic about each city but the
economic, ideological, and psychological
reliance on each other’s Other. The
criticism that this kind of work conjures
up is a larger, scholarly-activist one
which is finding it difficult to
emancipate itself from the object of its
criticism: Theoretically ‘cutting-edge’ if
convoluted for the uninitiated, the
historical actors in whose
underrepresented name new histories
are written appear as marionettes on the
stage where the real protagonists are the
authors. Can postcolonial criticism ever
be more than a commentary on the
constructs of exclusive history, can it be
a self-sustained inclusive history that
fully ‘overthrows’ Eurocentric, colonial
or racist histories? Overthrowing Geography
has not been able to replace or
supercede the reference system it aimed
to deconstruct. In spite of its theoretical
appeal and inspiring intersticiality, those
readers interested in the daily operations
of both cities are left, reluctantly, to
http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/
99
recur to traditional accounts – silences
and all – such as Joachim Schlör’s 1999
Tel Aviv; From Dream to City, which,
surprisingly, is unreferenced in LeVine’s
book. Meanwhile 20 th century Jaffa still
awaits its history to be written in
English.
_______________________________
Halliday, Fred
Two Hours that Shook the World--
September 11, 2001: Causes &
Consequences
London: Saqi Books, 2002.
Reviewed By Amir Asmar ∗
Only two chapters (1 and 12) of
Fred Halliday’s Two Hours that Shook the
World, along with the Introduction and
Conclusion, were written after the
terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
Consequently, the book feels somewhat
disjointed. Although replete with
valuable information and analytical
insights, it seems two books: one written
to discuss the causes and consequences
of the 11 September attacks, and
another to highlight a variety of issues in
the Muslim world and its relations with
the West. It is on the former that this
review will focus because, while the
issues of the relationship between the
Muslim and Western worlds are
undoubtedly related to the events of 11
September, Halliday does not explicitly
connect many of his pre-11 September
sections to the attacks themselves or to
the sections written specifically to
discuss them.
Halliday outlines the
shortcomings of this work—and
articulates a familiar thesis—early in the
introduction: “This collection is a
∗ Amir Asmar, a graduate of the University of
Chicago's Center for Middle East Studies, has
been a Middle East specialist for the US
Department of Defense for over fifteen years.
The views expressed in this review do not reflect
the official policy or position of the Department
of Defense or the US Government.