Keith P. Feldman, Assistant Professor

Office: 584 Barrows
Email: kpfeldman@berkeley.edu
Office hours: Fall 2009: Wednesdays, 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Racing the Question: Israel/Palestine and U.S. Imperial Culture, the working title to the book manuscript growing out of my dissertation, utilizes a comparative approach to globalizing twentieth century American connections to Israel/Palestine. While the idea that the U.S. has a "special relationship" with Israel has achieved the present-day status of unassailable common sense, Racing the Question shows how the articulation of this relationship has been both mediated and repeatedly contested in African, Arab, and Jewish diasporic literary culture and political theory. Heated questions about the meaning and function of race and ethnicity, national identity and imperial cartography, encampment and emancipation, genocide and Holocaust, security and social justice were central to these debates, connecting seemingly "domestic" concerns to the facts and fate of Israel/Palestine. In addition, I am pursuing a textual studies project to republish David Graham Du Bois' ...And Bid Him Sing (1975), an autobiographical novel about the cultural practices of black radicalism in Cairo in the 1960s.

Education

Ph.D., University of Washington, 2008 (with honors)
M.A., The George Washington University, 2003
B.A., Brown University, 2000 (cum laude)

Research interests

Comparative Ethnic Studies; Theories of Race and Ethnicity; Cultures of the African, Arab, and Jewish Diasporas; 19th and 20th century U.S. Popular Culture; U.S. in the World; Postcolonial Theory; Critical Theory; Public Humanities

Courses

Fall 2009

ES 190: Translation and the Dialect/ics of Diaspora

ES 180: Comparative Racialization in an Age of Endless War

Spring 2010

ES 101B: Humanities Methods in Ethnic Studies

ES 250: Comparativity and the Crisis of Neoliberalism

Selected publications

"War-time Engagement in Publicly Active Graduate Education." Co-authored with Anoop Mirpuri and Georgia Roberts. Engaged Scholarship, eds. Craig Martin and Georgia Roberts. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, forthcoming.

"America's Last Taboo: Rethinking Orientalism in the Post-Civil Rights Era." Liberty and Justice: America and the Middle East, ed. Patrick McGreevy. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 2009. 108-121.

"Affect, Ethics, and the Imaginative Geographies of Permanent War: An Interview with Derek Gregory." With Anoop Mirpuri and Georgia Roberts. Theory & Event 12.3 (2009).

"Antiracism and Environmental Justice in an Age of Neoliberalism: An Interview with Van Jones." With Anoop Mirpuri and Georgia Roberts. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 41.3 (2009): 401-415.

"Representing Permanent War: Black Power's Palestine and the End(s) of Civil Rights." CR: New Centennial Review 8.2 (Fall 2008): 193-231. (Reprinted in Black Routes to Islam, eds. Manning Marable and Hishaam D. Aidi. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.)

"fuga." Book review of Edward W. Said's On Late Style. Postmodern Culture 18.3 (2008).

"Poetic Geographies: Interracial Insurgency in Arab-American Autobiographical Spaces." Arab Women's Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing, ed. Nawar Al-Hassan Golley. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2007. 51-70.

Review of "The Black Panther" comic book series. MELUS: Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 32.3 (Fall 2007): 255-258.

"The (Il)legible Arab Body and the Fantasy of National Democracy." MELUS 31.4 (Winter 2006): 33-53.

Honors & Awards

2007: John C. Flanagan Dissertation Fellowship, University of Washington
2007: Society of Scholars Research Fellowship, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities (declined)
2006: Publicly Active Graduate Education Fellowship, Imagining America
2004-2006: Co-Principal Investigator, “Public Rhetorics and Permanent War,” funded by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center
2003: Distinguished Teacher Award, University of Washington Department of English