How can blackness be thought of in one’s mother tongue—Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Amharic, or Tigrit—and to what extent does such thought require a grammar that was formed in a different place and at a different time? What do whiteness, blackness, Zionism, and Judaism have to do with one another? In what senses can the residents and settlers of this part of the world—the Middle East, the Shami region, the Levant, Palestine, Israel—be thought of as white and black, and in what senses is it better to think in accordance with or against “local” terms such as brown, yellow, kushi [Cushite, a derogatory Hebrew term for black], schvartze chayes [a derogatory Yiddish term for black], Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Frankish, or natchi [a derogatory Amharic term for white]? How can the dialectic between East and West be aligned with the dialectic between whiteness and blackness? How should we relate to the refusal or willingness (or embarrassment) of many Ashkenazi Jews, in Israel and elsewhere, to consider themselves as white? Why do so many Ethiopian Israelis have an ambivalent and changing attitude toward identifying as black, while others embrace blackness, among other reasons because of a sense of struggle and liberation? What is the relationship between the blackness of Ethiopian Israelis and that of other groups—Palestinians, Mizrahim, and refugees and asylum seekers from Africa? What is the relation between blackness and place?

This issue of Theory and Criticism does not seek answers to these questions; rather, recognizing their importance, it seeks to create a space and a language in which they can be formulated and examined, and offer a platform for existing and new debates. Based on a commitment to the question of localness—the possibility that familiar questions take on new forms when they are posed from different starting points, in different places, at different times—the investigation undertaken in this issue is pursued mainly from the perspective of Ethiopian Israelis. We want to think about the place that enables this perspective, and about its inherent potential to serve as a fertile framework for thinking about the structure of relations between blackness and localness, here in Israel and in other contexts. Like many of those who have laid the foundations for black scholarship, we believe that tracing the development of political thought about blackness can also lead us to original insights into the human condition. According to C. L. R. James and Cedric Robinson, for example, the object of black studies is the understanding and criticism of “Western civilization” (Morse 1999). Similarly, Sylvia Wynter defines it as tracing the epistemological and ontological transformations that shaped modernity, and the invention of “the human race” (McKittrick 2015).

Focusing on the case of Ethiopian Israelis means focusing on the various points of connection that nurture and characterize different relations with blackness. As a group that identifies with the Israeli collective, even as the Jewishness and ethnic/racial classification of its members are often debated and called into question on various pretexts, Ethiopian Israelis constitute a rich and complex case study for examining the form and boundaries of local blackness. Of course, questions relating to blackness in this part of the world stretch beyond the case of Ethiopian Israelis: whether we view blackness as a skin color or as a social location, political orientation, universal demand, or “zone of non-being,” a comprehensive discussion of “local” blackness must be formulated from various different starting points, including those of refugees and asylum seekers from Africa, Afro-Bedouins, Palestinians, and Mizrahim.

In that sense, this issue has some very real lacunae, including the lack of perspectives from those who are neither Jewish nor Israeli. However, our purpose (as noted) is not to exhaust this debate, but to begin a movement toward the creation of spaces, vocabularies, and contexts through which the debate can be held and developed. We hope that we have succeeded in laying the foundations for this process, while at the same time leaving the strands of the conversation sufficiently loose so as to allow them to be woven anew with other conversations and spaces. This issue, then, traces not only the question of how the local black body is viewed from the perspective of black thought in its global sense, but also (and perhaps mainly) the question of how blackness is viewed from different perspectives, whether more or less local, which are necessarily particular and many in number.

***

At the beginning of 2021, a dozen of us founded a research and action group under the heading “When the local gazes back at the global: On blackness, identity, and political activism in the Ethiopian Israeli community,” with the support of Prof. Nissim Mizrachi, head of the Challenge of Shared Life Cluster at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and in partnership with the Shaharit Institute.

The background to the formation of this group included tensions that had risen to the surface just a few years previously. In May 2015, Israel’s cities were swept by protests by tens of thousands of Ethiopian Israelis, who were demonstrating against police violence toward the members of the Ethiopian Jewish community. With their choice of language and actions, the leaders of these protests and the demonstrators on the streets sought to challenge the boundaries of public debate in Israel and its familiar orientations—ethnicity, nationality, community—and to expand it to include questions of identity, belonging, and justice. Those whose ears are attuned to the struggles of the Ethiopian community in Israel could not help noticing that these protests constituted something new, and gave expression to deep-seated changes that were affecting Ethiopian Israeli activists at the time. These activists were seeking to address not only the present, but also the past of the community (characterized by marginalization and discrimination) and its political future, and were taking a new epistemological approach that views the question of skin color as a significant organizing principle. This approach promotes an agenda that is very different from the “melting pot” idea of the Zionist Israeli grammar, which until then had been a feature of their struggle. It may be possible to say that the political imagery that was formulated in these protests emphasized the hopelessness of the desire to be admitted into the civic collective in Israel, to be achieved by highlighting the commonalities between Ethiopian Israelis and the other sections of that collective—that is, their Jewishness, or their belonging to the Jewish people—and instead, placed their difference at the center of the discussion; that is, their blackness.

In this sense, the 2015 protests connected Ethiopian existence in Israel, in a more prominent and publicly noticed way, to the situation of the black diaspora throughout the world, and particularly in North America. Indeed, in order to understand the nature and roots of these changes, it is not sufficient to look at events in the local arena during the years preceding the protest. Rather, we must go back in time, and in particular move westward, beyond the Atlantic Ocean.

Over the course of 2013 and 2014, in response to killings of several young Afro-Americans by police officers in the United States, a decentralized protest network developed under the rallying cry “Black Lives Matter.” The forms of action that emerged from this protest included creative use of online platforms and of public space, and they echoed and were adopted around the world. This development led to a growing engagement with the politics of blackness in a range of international arenas, and emphasized the relevance of racial differentiation for understanding local inequality. Moreover, the use of categories of color and of the word “race” in institutional and everyday contexts became more widespread.[1] As stated, these processes also affected activists from the Ethiopian community in Israel. In 2015, at the height of these events, these activists developed new language and practices for a racial political struggle, as black people. By taking this step, Ethiopian Israeli activists joined their predecessors in the African diaspora around the world, and in the Israeli context, they joined Palestinian and Mizrahi activists, for many of whom black America was also a rich source for formulating a critical grammar, developing a political imagination, and building partnerships and struggles.

The fact that this group was formed at the Van Leer Institute—around a quarter of a decade after processes that led, among other things, to formulation at that very location of a critical grammar for thinking about race and Mizrahi identity in Israel, and consequently to the publication of several groundbreaking works in this field, including Mizrahim in Israel (Hever et al. 2002), Colonialism and the Post-Colonialist Situation (Shenhav 2004), and of course, Racism in Israel (Shenhav and Yona 2008)—was also pregnant with meaning. Those earlier processes were central to the development of a dominant strand of critical thought in Israel, which conceptualized different senses of local “racialization,” such as that of Mizrahim and Mizrahi identity, in relation to worldwide processes such as European colonialism and white supremacy, relying to a considerable degree on post-colonialist and Afro-American writing and critical scholarship (Chetrit 2003; Hever et al. 2002; Shohat 1999).

Recognizing the foundational epistemological influence of these processes and their deep importance for understanding the place in which we live, and based on an interest in the boundaries of critical sociology and its inherent dangers,[2] the group sought to assess, in a different light, the widespread tendency in Israeli academia, in civil society, and among Ethiopian Israeli activists to adopt ways of thinking that developed largely in the global north, and at the very least, were mediated to our context via North America.[3] Some of us were in no hurry to identify as black and to act based on this identification; others believed that even if there were good reasons to adopt critical black or anti-colonialist thought, it would at the very least need to be re-thought and re-formulated from within the communities, places, and bodies in which we reside.

In carrying out this joint exploration, we attached great importance to extended interpersonal meetings, as well as to the composition of the group: a small number of its members were from Ashkenazi and Mizrahi backgrounds, while the large majority were Ethiopian Israelis from a diverse range of backgrounds and age groups and with diverse orientations, and over time the differences between them proved to be very significant. The group was both method and substance for us—the monthly meetings we held over the three years of our activities, the relationships and tensions that emerged from them, our joint readings of texts, and in particular, the long-term, collaborative, guided process of writing a collection of essays that range from the local to the global, from the biographical to the theoretical, on which this issue is based. Via all these means, we sought to create a space in which it would be possible to step away from the dizzying dialectics that repeatedly shape a political and epistemological field that is formulated between two magnetic poles. We sought together to create a space from which it would be possible to look anew at a reality that so often forces us to choose between restrictive versions of ourselves or of components of our world that are brimming with complexity and tension.

***

The tension between the components in our world is defined to a large degree based on our position vis-à-vis the contexts of belonging from which the meaning of action and of identity emerges; in other words, from different readings of the genealogy of the subject, different experiences of the timelines and spaces of our existence, and connections to different root systems that feed its external and internal definition, and which are needed for understanding its ability to operate toward and together with others.

At one end of the spectrum is the position that emphasizes Ethiopian Israelis being “an ethnic community, not a race.”[4] According to this view, the important elements in defining the identity of Ethiopian Israelis are not the color of their skin or their race in terms that their environment uses to interpret them, but first and foremost their shared origins and language, their cultural and religious traditions, their family, and the cosmology and worlds of meaning in which and through which they act. Indeed, by emphasizing the ethnic differences between different groups of Jews, this position can actually serve to highlight the closeness or similarities between them, as in the end—whatever their origin or skin color—they share the same principles of faith, the same deep emotional connection to the Jewish people, the same experience of hostility from their non-Jewish surroundings (including occasional bouts of violent persecution), and in particular, the same aspiration to make a home in the land of our forefathers and foremothers, to settle it and build a Jewish state in it, with all the social, cultural, and linguistic implications thereof. In this sense, the skin color of Ethiopian Israelis, like the other elements of their identity that differentiate them from their environment, is not substantively different from the differences that mark other ethnic communities. On the contrary, it may facilitate their distinct participation in a project with many participants, alongside all the other parts of Jewish Zionist society in Israel (Aharon 2010).

At the opposite pole is a completely different approach, situated among trans-local or global processes. An illustration of this approach can be found in the writing of the sociologist and pan-African activist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, and particularly in his treatment of the formation of the “color line” in the twentieth century (Du Bois 1903); that is, in his writing about the distinction legislated in the body, in space, and in the symbolic and political fields between “whiteness” and “blackness,” a distinction that is rooted in the foundations of the modern world and of the political economy that supports it. Early on in his career, Du Bois wrote about the color line in the United States and in North American society (Du Bois 2007a [1899]; 2013 [1935]), but later he developed an approach that conceptualizes this phenomenon as global and as tightly linked to processes that, even if their sources may be rooted in particular times and places, have during the modern period become trans-national or global—such as European imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism (Du Bois 1986 [1940]; 2007b [1946]).

As the work of many others further made clear, at the heart of these processes, which established and continue to shape the modern world, is the transatlantic slave trade, and in particular, the “middle passage”: a mass grave and a trans-border intercontinental space through which millions of people from all over the African continent were forcefully transported to the continent of America and to the Caribbean (Gilroy 1993).[5] With murderous violence, this forced movement tore people away from their lives, their roots, and their realities, and sought to make them into goods, into “meat” (Spillers 1987), into a body inhabited by a subject that from now on would be in a state of social or ontological death (Patterson 1982; Wilderson 2020). By means of this movement, people were stripped of their humanity and transplanted to modern space and time, which sought to encircle the globe. Their entry into this world was always via the category of the non-existent, as those who are here now in their bodies but who will always also be left on the outside. This approach thus focuses attention on the relation between the body that is experienced, marked, or enabled as black—a body that is always in a certain place and that has a rich genealogy, even if it is no longer accessible to the subject—and trans-border processes that act on it unceasingly and seek to assemble it into a shared experience,[6] an undistinguishable, unexceptional grave.

This conceptualization of the subject-object dichotomy creates a language, a toolbox, and to a large extent also networks through which it is possible to draw trans-border lines and thus develop solidarity among black or racialized people and communities worldwide. While trans-local processes seek to establish or unify “the world” as modern in a way that also allows for its division into distinct national territorial units, a central element in black thought is committed to characterizing these global processes so as to enable their many victims around the world to identify them and to position themselves against the shared foundations of their struggle.[7] Ethiopian Israelis can be included among these victims, as it was their migration to Israel that largely facilitated their being “made” black, that as, identified as those whose otherness positions them on the margins of the Jewish collective in Israel and as part of the black diaspora throughout the world. Many Ethiopian Israelis will testify that the longer they stay in Israel, the blacker they become.

One outcome of this way of thinking that presents itself is a conceptualization of public space in Israel, and perhaps even of Zionism and of Israel as a national entity, as white or as colonialist, and at the very least as continuations of the modern western world and of the action of the color line in its global sense. In opposition to these, black thought can offer a starting point for action, and even for nurturing a radical imagination able not only to reach beyond the existing borders, across time and the world in the senses described above, but perhaps also to undermine them or to weaken their foundations, with the aim of imagining and constructing other worlds.

But for those very same reasons, a movement in this spirit also runs the risk of raising fears among those who seek to preserve and sanctify ways of life, traditions, and worlds of meaning that have never ceased to exist and to hold non-linear inter-relations with the global, modern world, even as this world as sought (and still seeks) to swallow it up. How is the middle passage relevant to the bodies and lives of Jews of Ethiopian origin in Israel? Many of them continue, to a large extent, to live and exist not only in Hebrew, but also (and perhaps mainly) in Amharic or Tigrit; to preserve, pass on, and develop ancient daily rituals and communal relationships that enable them; and thus to exist also in a temporality and a genealogy that the white global movement has never succeeded in eradicating, translating, or appropriating. In this sense, streams within black thought that give voice to global claims, that leave little room for place, for histories, for languages, and for bodies that preceded whiteness, and that always exist in tension with their blackness can be perceived as dangerous, and perhaps even more seriously, as irrelevant. If blackness is defined via real, ontological, or social death, and thus via the inability to make a place for oneself in the world, then is the very attempt to think in terms of local blackness not a form of heresy?

In relation to the above, it is important to note the difference between two positions that disagree with the local adoption of black thought, the foundations of which were laid largely in a different place and time. One of these positions is opposed to the global or North American discourse of blackness, and occasionally even mocks it, based on an integrative orientation: it seeks to “include” Ethiopian Israelis in a shared national or Zionist project. But the nature of this project was decided by a select few at certain times and places for all those seeking to enter its gates. The integrative aspiration is to emphasize what Ethiopian Israelis share in common with the other parts of Jewish society in Israel; but along the way it tends to blur and to sanction the mechanisms that work to force Ethiopian Israelis into modern Israel via rigid physical and symbolic containers, which pre-define their contents and act to exterminate traditions, ways of life, and worlds that are brimming with meaning.[8] As noted, a central element of global black thought seeks to categorize the activities of such mechanisms in order to identify and understand them and to stand in opposition to them.

A second position that disagrees with the local adoption of global black thought does so due to concerns that this discourse does not leave enough room for all those things that are left out of trans-border or universal patterns of thinking; that is, for fear that Ethiopian-ness, Jewishness, or localness will shrink, disappear, and lose their meaning. From this perspective, the dangers presented by adopting a “global” grammar are surprisingly similar to the dangers presented by Israeli whiteness—that is, those presented by the integrative approach, which seeks to include Ethiopian Israelis into the Jewish collective in Israel by means of a symbolic erasure of their ancient traditions, their fathers and mothers, and their own selves.

The joint process we are seeking to advance thus requires finding ways to maintain an impossible space between two poles. These poles, in certain versions, are formulated as completing one another: from the perspective of the local subject, they both can threaten, explicitly or implicitly, to define it always and necessarily from the outside or from above, via the building blocks that various kinds of global discourse make available to us.

Thus, both from the starting point of whiteness, which acts to put in place the transparent conditions that make it possible to participate in the modern world; and from the starting point of blackness, which is conceptualized as a complete and uniform absence—there is no room left for the local, for the phenomenological, and in the context of our current subject, for the Ethiopian subject marked as black. But this conceptualization of the polarity between whiteness and blackness is at the very least partial, and to a considerable degree, tendentious.[9] For of course, black thought was never singular, as many in Israel sometimes tend to paint it, and considerable streams within it seek to focus attention precisely on that impossible dynamic from within which the black subject is formed, in the face of a world that seeks to imprison it within a container defined externally, but always does so in a partial and incomplete manner.[10] Thus, despite its tremendous force and the huge volume of resources invested in it, this human project does not have the power to trap the black object and to put a final stop to its movement; the black object continues to vibrate restlessly against its boundaries, like a sound box. As Fred Moten (2006, 183) writes, “the object vibrates against its frame like a resonator, and troubled air gets out.”

***

This same vibration between the object and the borders of its frame is present in the daily lives of all of us, even though we usually experience it on our own. Relating to the ways in which this phenomenon is manifested physically and emotionally, Du Bois writes about dual consciousness: “It is a strange feeling, dual consciousness, this feeling of always seeing yourself through the eyes of others, of measuring your soul by the yardstick of the world, which watches you with amused contempt and with mercy. You always feel your duality: American, black; two souls, two thoughts, two uncompromising struggles, two ideals fighting one another within a single black body, which is only kept from being torn to shreds by its own stubborn power” (Du Bois 2009, 25).

This issue was born of an attempt to listen to that vibration described by Moten and to harness it to movement, to find ways to keep hold of the internal division that Du Bois and others write about, to contain it not only in our bodies but also in those same margins that can be made into a shared space; to allow the dual consciousness to unfold and spread out. And indeed, the tension between blackness and Israeli-ness, as they function and are viewed in the various spaces we inhabit—our families, public space, the world of law, social media, academia, civil society organizations—once again took different forms in our group space. Over our three years of working as a group, we made every effort to keep this space open, despite the forces from all sides acting to close it. Our commitment to one another and to our joint movement allowed us to keep hold of this tension even when the poles of the real world around us moved further apart.

However, that same impossible tension became a rupture after October 7 and the weeks that followed it. Around two weeks after that appalling Saturday, Saidiya Hartman, the African American scholar whose writings had a large impact on black thought, and one of whose articles we had earlier decided to include in this issue in translation, signed an open letter expressing unequivocal solidarity with the Palestinian people, and calling (among other things) for an immediate ceasefire. Particularly important was the fact that, apart from a general statement opposing “violence toward citizens, regardless of their identity,” the original wording of the letter made no explicit reference to the events of October 7, nor to the Israeli victims of that attack.

An update to the letter was published several days later clarifying that its authors shared the widespread revulsion at the horrifying massacre conducted by Hamas, in which 1,400 Israelis were murdered, and called for the immediate release of all hostages.[11] Without delving too deeply into the wording of the letter, many of those in our Israeli and Jewish surroundings viewed it as part of a broader, outrageous, and antisemitic response by the “global left.” Several members of the group felt, in the light of Hartman signing the open letter, that publishing one of her texts at the current time, as part of an issue that is the first significant product of the joint process described above, would mean taking a clear stance, and at the very least, turning our backs on the victims of October 7 and the hostages, on their families and friends, and on the Jewish people. As one member of the group put it, the situation once again presented him with a choice between his Jewishness and his blackness, and if this was the cruel equation into which he was thrown, then he would have to choose the former option. Others took the opposite stance, whether because they did not view the publication of Hartman’s article in these circumstances as meaning that the group would be taking sides, but rather as an opportunity to deal more deeply with dominant trends in black thought which place Ethiopian Israelis in a particularly complex position; or because they did not view the wording of the letter—particularly after the update—as turning a cold shoulder to their people; or because they did not oppose the wording but identified with it, and particularly with the explicit call for a ceasefire. After lengthy conversations and several group meetings, the depth of the crisis became clear. We could no longer contain the divisions among us.

It is possible to view the open letter and Hartman’s signature—who in the circumstances, was given the mantle of representing black thought, not of her own desire and in contrast with the processes reflected in her work—as an expression of a trend led over many years by black scholars and activists in the United States and elsewhere to align themselves with anti-colonialist or decolonializing struggles, and to draw parallels between the black struggle and the Palestinian struggle. In this sense, Israel has never looked whiter.

If until this point, we had been able to contain the tensions within the shared space we created, the current moment stretched the group to breaking point. The circumstances appeared to be forcing each and every one of us to choose which pole to be drawn toward, while understanding that every unrecognized shift would be immediately framed within rigid, pre-prepared schemas. But is this truly the situation? Can we really only choose between blackness and Jewishness, as our fellow member stated? Or is it possible to formulate a Jewish, local, and black position, perhaps one that is not subject to the borders of Israeli-ness or Zionism as these are described here, or to the frameworks of public, academic, and political discourse that operate within them and through them?[12] The current moment is challenging foundational assumptions about Israeli-ness in ways that are yet to be clarified. For if blackness and whiteness are situated in dialectic opposition, then what is the otherness toward which Israel is situated, and what is its place in our meetings? Is it possible that the longer we stay in Israel and make our home in it, we become not only more black, but also, simultaneously, more white? Whatever the case, it seems that the discussion of local blackness will always remain limited if it stays within the boundaries of that same Israeli-ness.

***

At the heart of the issue is a collection of essays by members of the group. Apart from the five essays published here, three others were omitted from the issue due to the events described above. The collection is situated in the middle of the issue, in part due to our commitment to the question of localness, that is, to the recognition that local black thought also begins with the body and with the place in which we are situated.

Mazal Bisawer addresses the development of black political consciousness among native Israelis with Ethiopian origins. She focuses on the processes of identity formation, and looks at how repeated experiences of dealing with racism embed the fact of blackness within the process of self-formation. The engagement with questions of blackness among the second generation, she explains, is also shaping their political consciousness and connecting it to global ideas about blackness. Bisawer elucidates how, despite the tension between the contours of the local context and those of the international context, dealing with anti-black racism in Israel means addressing the value and advantages found in global black thought.

Efrat Yerday explores the analogy between sexual harassment and racial harassment via micro-aggressions, daily experiences of otherness, and objectification of the body. While sexual harassment have become established as an object for thought and as a basis for political organization, and become entwined with social and institutional sanctions, racial harassment does not receive the same recognition, despite being an undeniable part of daily life. Via this comparison, Yerday describes how the difference between the two types of violence, which are manifested in a single body, creates “chronic disorientation,” and sheds light on the poverty of language and the inability to appreciate the connection between anti-blackness and “the experience of incongruence.”

The essay by Fekade Abebe offers a fascinating reflection on the group’s stormy debates of one of the most thorny issues we dealt with—the topic of Israeli-ness versus Jewishness, and the place of Ethiopian Jews within it. In an attempt “to challenge the specific Jewishness that dictates the religious, cultural, social, and political agenda in Israel,” Abebe presents a sociopolitical analysis of the advantages of this process as it relates to conceptualization and construction of a civil platform for new political action in the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel.

Maayan Ravid returns to 2013 and the opening of the Holot detention facility for asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea, and analyzes those events via the writings of Du Bois and Hartman, as they intersect in the prism of Afro-pessimism. Her essay emphasizes the dialectical and hierarchical relations that divide black from human, constructed via violence in the form of the detention facility. Ravid bears witness in her writing to the physical and psychological scars left by detention on Adaham, an asylum seeker from Sudan. Via this encounter with state violence, she reflects on the meaning of responsible political and academic writing and action, such as recognize the power relations that dominate the local context, but do not necessarily rely on external binary categories. Rather, such writing and action are formed in response to specific contexts, and take diverse and uniquely local forms.

Gil Rothschild Elyassi delves into the relationship between whiteness, Mizrahi-ness, and Ashkenazi-ness. “Whiteness provides a starting point for Mizrahi-ness, and thus it is a foundational pillar in its conditions of possibility,” he says, and asks: “But what is the white space?” Via the body, which refuses to be categorized and stubbornly insists on remembering what space and consciousness seek to erase from memory, Rothschild Elyassi writes the story of the success and failure of the whitening of place through the continuing attempt to expropriate it, cleanse it, and remap it according to an orientation that requires “east” [“Mizrah”] in order to find its direction. Alongside all this, body and place remind us that white space was in actual fact never white. But how do we and the body remember different things? And if we are “here,” where is the body that remembers?

The tension that is contained within the five essays, and is given different expressions by them, is once again framed as an explicit dialectical movement in the discussion conducted by Sami Shalom Chetrit, Merav Nakar-Sadi, Mazal Bisawer, and Yonit Naaman. The lively debate between these speakers, who position themselves differently with regard to the topic under discussion from physical, social, and epistemic perspectives, touches on different relationships with blackness among different groups in Israel. The debate, which took place in response to the collection of essays produced by members of the group, seeks among other things to address the question of how the language of color, race, and racial distinctions helps us understand the place in which we live and advance the political debate around inequality and power relations in Israel.

By putting into words, and occasionally in an oppositional manner, the advantages and disadvantages of using local categories instead of global categories, the discussion also highlights the ways in which racial categorization, as opposed to local-ethnic categorization, may have a knock-on political effect that blurs local antagonistic relations. Thus, for example, the use of “white” instead of “Ashkenazi” involves, on the one hand, the distancing of Jewish Israelis from their biographical connections toward the creation and maintenance of local power relations, and on the other hand, the racialization and positioning of Ethiopian Israelis and others with African origins as the ultimate “others.” In contrast to the way in which the global discourse is automatically identified with progressiveness and the exposure of power mechanisms, the voices in this discussion make it possible to hear those who seek to challenge the entry of the language of race into public and political discourse in Israel, and to view its rise as a product of distanced imperial influences. At different points during the debate, the question is repeatedly raised (sometimes explicitly, sometimes hinted at) of the absence from this discourse of Palestinian speakers and asylum seekers from Africa. From this perspective, the question once again comes into focus of whether in certain senses, the commonalities among the relationships between different groups in Israel and the question of blackness are greater than their differences.

The portfolio curated by Efrat Yerday explores the ways in which the question of the relationship between Israeli-ness, Ethiopian-ness, and blackness is framed in the works of Israeli artists of Ethiopian origin. The works in this portfolio present the plurality that exists in Ethiopian Israeli art. Despite the similarities in the structural location of these artists in several fields, the works show us different conceptions and decisions regarding the connection between Ethiopian-ness and blackness in the political and cultural sense. Some of these relate to foregrounding Ethiopian-ness as a response to its erasure from public space in general, and from artistic space in particular, or as a response to stereotypical presentations of Ethiopian-ness; others relate to the reconnection to Ethiopia and Ethiopian-ness, against the backdrop of the erasure of this component and its displacement in favor of an “Israeli” identity. The artistic works presented in this section relate to one or more categories, and ask: What is the nature of the relations between them? Can they exist alongside one another, or must we choose between them? Does Ethiopian-ness necessarily embody blackness? The portfolio presents a reality in which it would seem that there is no way to answer these questions one way or another, and in which space must be found for plurality, movement, and contradictions.

***

The issue opens with four articles that trace the encounter between blackness and the local in different ways, from different starting points, and within different systems of relations.

Adene Zawdu Gebyanesh presents the Afropessimist school, via a reading of the works of Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton, two scholars who are particularly identified with the development of this approach. Out of a commitment to emphasizing the multilayered history of black thought and its internal diversity, the article also devotes space to a discussion of key figures who deeply influenced Afropessimist thinking, including Orlando Peterson, Sylvia Winter, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Harman, and Fred Moten, and clarifies the implications of Afro-pessimistic thinking for research into race and color in Israel. The article has two main sections: First, it discusses the disadvantages of Afro-pessimistic thought via the traditional phenomenological research of blackness and the multiple modernities approach; and then it shows how the advantages of this approach highlight analytical failings at the heart of the conceptualization and use of the categories of color and race in Israeli research. The article concludes with a discussion of the benefits for research of a prism that emphasizes the role of localism in the formation of social difference.

Fekade Abebe examines the book by the Cameroonian philosopher and historian Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason. Adebe’s article presents Mbembe’s thinking about changes in the categories of black and blackness, from their function and meaning in modern history to categories that signify the political situation of many throughout the world today, “who are subject to the authority of neo-capitalist forces,” becoming a global black class. Reading the article raises complex questions about the very ability to situate blackness, and thereby to distinguish between the local and the global. Are we in an era in which the former is collapsing into the latter?

Louise Bethlehem analyzes the reception of the Arabic production of the play The Island, directed by Amit Gazit and presented at the Haifa Municipal Theater in 1983. At the center of the article is the practice of blackface, which originated in the United States but which also became politically relevant in many other places in the world. In a fascinating exploration of the question of place, the article emphasizes how “the transposition of the play into Arabic, and the unconventional casting choices” created a distance from the South African original and a proximity to local politics and to the power struggles that emerge from them. Bethlehem analyzes this case via what she calls “the oscillatory nature of apartheid,” a theoretical lens with which she examines the processes of political and cultural mediation that shape “the circulation of expressive anti-apartheid culture beyond the borders of South Africa.” In particular, the article argues, tracing these processes can teach us about the different receptions given to the struggle around race and blackness in the international context and in local arenas. Bethlehem writes:

]The understanding of] the similarity between South African political prisoners and Palestinian prisoners can connect to the investigation of a broader system of political similarity, in which Palestinian, South African, and Afro-American activists formulate conclusions about oppression and resistance in various contexts of oppression, in order to presage what later social theorists confirmed: that race or ethnic origin and the punitive justice system are intertwined.

The article by Shelly Engdau Vanda draws on the approach to resilience that she developed in her book Resilience in Immigration (Engdau Vanda 2019), and expands it via an analysis of the ways in which Ethiopian Israelis deal with racism, as emerge from their daily experiences in Israel. Via a research study based on in-depth interviews with 22 young Ethiopian Israelis, Engdau Vanda presents a typology of four strategies for dealing with anti-black racism: direct confrontation; retroactive interpretation of labeling and channeling it into action; reflection on the encounter between outside and inside; and turning to protest actions and collective empowerment informed by demonstrations of blackness in other countries. Endgau Vanda stresses that “the connection between local strategies and global struggles does not indicate an absolute adoption of external universal liberal discourse, but rather signifies an additional rhetorical possibility,” and that it makes accessible concepts and images that enable the local community “to conceptualize and to disseminate its messages based on integration with its specific and local sources.” In other words, the article presents a local Ethiopian version of black consciousness and resistance to anti-black racism. This is a consciousness that makes use of the universal values at its disposal, but simultaneously is rooted in its Ethiopian, Jewish, and Israeli sources.

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The final part of the issue presents a pillar of the scholarship of two giants of the field who write and work in the United States, and whose ideas have made waves across the globe: the historian and cultural researcher Saidiya Hartman, and the philosopher Lewis Gordon. Their writings and ideas about blackness, anti-black racism, and black politics are woven throughout the entire issue. Hartman and Gordon both published their first books in the 1990s, and both books were rapidly established as foundational works in the field of blackness studies. Since then, they have published dozens of texts and brought through a great many students.

Adane Zawdu Gebyanesh’s interview with Lewis Gordon for this issue revisits his first book, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, which was first published in 1995 and is due to be republished in a new edition to mark its thirtieth anniversary. Via the book, Gordon and Gebyanesh discuss the phenomenological insight of the physical embodiment of consciousness, the exploration of anti-black racism as a form of self-deceit in bad faith, and its opposite, “critical good faith.” They also discuss Gordon’s writing about Fanon, and his thinking regarding the politics of Israel-Palestine after October 7. In contrast with the tendency to read Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth via one of its chapters, which many understand as legitimizing violence in the struggle against colonialism, Gordon suggests expressing Fanon’s position regarding violence in terms of tragedy. In this way, Gordon says, the use of violence in Fanon becomes “anti-violence,” as an opposite to colonialist violence and to all forms of dehumanization. Based on this point, Gordon highlights the conservative dialectic that is manifested among people on the Israeli left.

The issue concludes with a translation of an article by Saidiya Hartman, one of the most important black scholars of our time, in which she seeks to write the impossible by tracing the life and death of Venus, a young black woman held captive on a slave ship. By collecting the traces and the black holes that Venus left behind, Hartman seeks to call to account the transatlantic archives, as the violence inflicted on Venus’s body and life also irreversibly shaped the trail of documents and testimonies about her that remains, and through which the historian can know her now. In such a situation, how can one critique the arena of enslavement without reproducing the grammar of violence? If it is no longer enough to uncover the outrage, as Hartman makes clear, then how can one create a new set of descriptions from this archive? Hartman’s failure is rich in insights. Thus, for example, she lays the foundations for a method she calls “critical fabulation,” which is added to the system of concepts and the methodology she developed for dealing with the archive of transatlantic slavery—a practice of writing, also described as an effort against the limitations of the archive.

Zohar Elmakias, who translated the article, also provides an introductory essay. Elmakias explains that Hartman’s project, as manifested in the process of collecting and collating the traces left by Venus, allows her to voice a harsh and creative critique of the view that an archive can “serve as a reliable source for a personal, intimate, and historical narrative.” Discussing the in-built intimacy of blackness and death, and developing the methods for tracing the closeness to life, Elmakias places Hartman’s scholarship alongside that of Christina Sharp and Achille Mbembe, and describes how these write “a poetry that not only shifts the existing horizon of historical research,” but also—by means of tools such as speculative narrative—gives voice to and strengthens those who are imprisoned in the archives as present-absentees.

Many people have contributed to producing this issue. The development and publishing of the portfolio of essays would not have been possible without the kind help of Yonit Naaman, who supported the writing process and at the very beginning provided assistance with content editing, and of Rachel Peretz, who joined Yonit at a later stage. We also offer our heartfelt thanks to Esther Bisawer, for her enormous contribution to the management and organization of the portfolio from its inception, performed with sensitivity and professionalism. We also thank Anat Shalem, the coordinator of Theory and Criticism, and Shaul Setter, its editor, for rising to the challenge and for their contributions throughout the work on this issue. Their support, which remained constant in the face of moments of crisis, was critical to the development and realization of the issue. Special thanks are due to Prof. Nissim Mizrachi, who encouraged the formation of the group and has supported its work over the years; to Kinneret Sadeh, for her help in the early stages; to Eilon Schwartz and the Shaharit Institute; and to Shai Lavi, the director of the Van Leer Institute, for the continuing support for the work of the group. Thanks to Assi Levy, who brought to every meeting not only food but also a cheerful and welcoming presence and words of encouragement. Thanks to Itzik (Yitzhak) Dassa and Ruty Wondimagen, whose ideas and research insights contributed to the development of the group and to our thinking about the topic of the issue. Thanks also to Nadav Haber, Danny Admasu, and Alaa Hajyahia for their support for the work of the group at the very beginning, and for their contribution to our thinking about local blackness in Israel.