A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem

In the mid-nineteenth century, Jerusalem was rich with urban texts inscribed in marble, gold, and cloth, investing holy sites with divine meaning. Ottoman modernization and British colonial rule transformed the city; new texts became a key means to organize society and subjectivity. Stone inscriptions, pilgrims' graffiti, and sacred banners gave way to street markers, shop signs, identity papers, and visiting cards that each sought to define and categorize urban space and people.

A City in Fragments tells the modern history of a city overwhelmed by its religious and symbolic significance. Yair Wallach walked the streets of Jerusalem to consider the graffiti, logos, inscriptions, official signs, and ephemera that transformed the city over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As these urban texts became a tool in the service of capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism, the affinities of Arabic and Hebrew were forgotten and these sister-languages found themselves locked in a bitter war. Looking at the writing of—and literally on—Jerusalem, Wallach offers a creative and expansive history of the city, a fresh take on modern urban texts, and a new reading of the Israel/Palestine conflict through its material culture.

The book was the winner of the 2022 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, sponsored by the Association of Jewish Studies (AJS).

About the speakers

Yair Wallach is Reader in Israeli Studies at SOAS University of London.

Rebecca Gould (Birmingham) is the author of Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), which was awarded the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies and the best book award by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies, and the translator of After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (Central European University Press, 2015). From 2018-2023, she is PI for the ERC-funded project, “Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures Compared.”

Registration

This event will take place in-person and will not be recorded. Seating is limited and is on a first-come, first-served basis. Complete our registration form to secure your place.

Chair: Dina Matar (SOAS)

Organiser: SOAS Middle East Institute

Contact email: smei@soas.ac.uk