In Orientalism, Zionism and Academic Practice, Eyal Clyne investigates (Jewish) Israeli academic Middle East and Islam Studies (MEIS) as a site of orientalism, Zionism, and power-knowledge, casting an eye particularly at everyday academic practices and how Israeli MEIS scholars narrate their work. Clyne uses the untranslated mizraḥanut throughout to retain a sharp focus on academic Israeli Middle East and Islam (MEIS) as a field of teaching, research, and public service.
This work comprises three distinct, but related studies: Part 1 offers a genealogical historicization of mizraḥanut (Chapters 1 and 2); Part 2, an investigation into the Israeli MEIS response to Saidian orientalism (Chapters 3 and 4); and Part 3, a critical discourse analysis of how Israeli MEIS practitioners narrate their academic practices (Chapters 5 through 8).
Clyne develops a sociology of the field (Chapter 1) and uses an anthropological history approach that produces intersubjective memory of the field by its participants (Chapter 2). Organized in terms of sociological generations, or cohorts of “joint historical experiences” (p. 34), Clyne elaborates at least five generations of academic mizraḥans, helpfully narrating the development of the field while surfacing rivalries, relations, crises, and hegemonies. The narrative begins with the School for Orient Studies, constituted with the formation of Hebrew University in 1925, and proceeds through succeeding generations to the early 2000s, along the way, taking up the long-standing dominance of Hebrew University in the field, the challenge that arose from Tel Aviv University, the early and endemic entanglements of mizraḥans with state and security entities, the Israeli Oriental Society, the main journals, and the MEIS unit at Ben Gurion University. In investigating the origins and identity of the field, this account loosens the connection of the field to German intellectual roots, re-rooting them in large part in the Israeli colonial project itself, but also to neoliberalism (the author also acknowledges American influence, but does not elaborate). Individual mizraḥans drive much of the narrative movement as established professors mentored a new generation, as rivals negotiated their positions in academic power structures, and as researchers toggled between their roles in higher education and the security establishment. This study concludes with an investigation of the reformation of the Israel Oriental Society into the MEIS Association of Israel to reorient the organization to norms in the larger MEIS field, nodding to dynamic changes in the field, some of which were connected to Edward Said's Orientalism.
Clyne also explores how Israeli MEIS negotiated challenges to its legitimacy and social position from the “crisis of representation” brought on, perhaps most pointedly by Said's Orientalism, first published in 1978, but not translated into Hebrew until 2000. In this section, Clyne organizes and examines texts critical of mizraḥanut (Chapter 3) and explores critical reflexive texts from electronic mizraḥanut chat rooms in 2004–7 (Chapter 4). The body of texts the author reviews is interdisciplinary (anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, sociology, etc.) and appears in various formats (anthologies, monographs, online chatroom feeds, etc.)—the earliest text is from 1966 with most of the texts emerging in the 1990s and 2000s. Clyne employs a set of critical epistemologies from Bruno Latour to classify epistemological critiques of mizraḥanut: positivist critiques, which seek to correct issues of fact and interpretation; social critiques, aimed against power structures, hegemonies, inequity, etc.; and deconstructive critiques, which address latent intersubjective structures. The author includes a case study of a Gil Eyal text and its critical reception in Israeli MEIS circles, further teasing out mizraḥanut epistemological positions. Clyne finds that critique of and by mizraḥans sometimes misses the author's theoretical analysis; fails to include Israel as an object of examination; and neglects to develop any critique that would threaten the field's legitimacy, rather “seeing critique as an internal device for improvement, thus coopting it and curtailing its radical potential” (p. 144).
In the third, and largest section Clyne offers a Foucauldian critical discourse analysis of fragments drawn from ethnographic interviews of mizraḥans conducted in 2012–14. It is in this section that the author's self-articulated expansion of focus from postcolonial themes to “include academic practice, structures, and culture” is clearest (p. 239). Thus, this section is about “how the field speaks through individuals” (p. 155). This study is organized by four principle themes emerging from the fragments: interest (Chapter 5), exploring how mizraḥans employ industrial and courtship metaphors to frame their work; marketing (Chapter 6) looking at the use of commercial images to describe student recruitment into Israeli MEIS programs; mission (Chapter 7), examining the structures mizraḥans use to articulate their public mission and the discursive strategies employed to maintain legitimacy; and security (Chapter 8), analyzing the legitimacy and “border-crossing” work to which discourses are put in light of the entanglements between academic mizraḥanut and the security establishment.
Clyne takes up an ambitious array of theoretical resources. Because this work is intended to be read “across scholarly traditions” (p. 7), Clyne gives early space to systematically identify the theories used in the study and explain how they work, explicating what might have been internal and unstated logic in other studies. The author engages, inter alia, with Bordieu (field, habitus, cultural capital, etc.), Foucault (power-knowledge, discourse), Gamson and Modigliani (frame), Marx (ideology, use-value, exchange-value), Althusser (interpellation of subjects), Mannheim (weltanschauung), and Said (orientalism). Clyne puts these approaches to good use throughout the study, but the analysis generates the need for new concepts as well. To answer theoretical needs in the analysis which existing resources do not address, the author inventively frames new terms such as symbolic colonialism, a summative, descriptive term for Saidian orientalism, and duo-interest, a term that captures the simultaneous intellectual curiosity (interest) and biased (interest) nature of Jewish-Israeli academic study of the “Muslim-Arab.”
Orientalism, Zionism and Academic Practice is an effective exploration of its topic, but slips in a few minor ways. Referencing Michel de Certeau, Clyne sets out to offer a spatial examination of Israeli campuses, but the observation seems to be over before it starts. Given Israeli practices around spatial planning and control, Clyne's choice to explore spatiality is well advised, so it's too bad the exploration is abandoned so quickly. This dimension could have been further developed to give a spatial and geographic dimension to Clyne's critical (yet emic) study. Additionally, the author effectively recruits Foucauldian power-knowledge to explore intersubjective discourses that maintain positions of legitimacy and dominance in Israeli MEIS, especially mediated by everyday practices (this is the book's chief value), but the author's voice on the relationship between the themes of power-knowledge, strongly expressed in the first two thirds of the book, and the neo-liberal and mundane themes of practice that emerged from the discourse analysis, would have improved the coherence between the different studies.
Despite these reservations, Orientalism, Zionism and Academic Practice will reward those with a critical interest in academia, especially in the production and maintenance of power-knowledge; those who watch Israel-Palestine; and those interested in the construction of fields of expertise.
