Reviews 321 Editor’s note: IJMES ordinarily reviews books only within three years of publication. How- ever, we are publishing this review due to extenuating circumstances that prevented its pub- lication at an earlier date. ELLA SHOHAT, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006) Pp. 406. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paperback. REVIEWED BY REBECCA LUNA STEIN, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Women’s Studies, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; e-mail: rlstein@duke.edu DOI: 10.1017/S0020743808080604 Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices is a collection of Ella Shohat’s landmark writings from the last two decades, including both new and republished essays. Taken together, this collection makes a set of indispensable arguments about the interplay between culture, empire, race, gender, and the politics of representation in dissimilar geohistorical contexts. This kind of comparativist inquiry is at the crux of Shohat’s intellectual project and turns on a critical method that she refers to as “relationality,” that is, a mode of scholarly inquiry that “stress[es] the horizontal and vertical links that thread communities and histories together in a conflictual network” (p. 207). A relational approach, Shohat contends, “operates at once within, between and beyond the nation–state framework, [and] calls attention to the conflictual, hybrid interplay between communities within and across borders” (p. 207). “Relationality” should not be misread as “transnationality” in any limited sense. The term also marks Shohat’s investment in “crossovers and echoes” between scholarly disciplines, theoretical vocabularies, and historical contexts (p. xiv). The collection’s thematic and theoretical range is broad. Taboo Memories includes discussion of feminist, postcolonial, and transnational debates; critical interrogations of Third World cinema and media theory; and grounded analyses of the links among race, gender, and empire. Much of this material will be extremely useful for scholars working in Middle East studies because it offers a set of theoretical paradigms and interdisciplinary linkages that remain beyond the purview of much Middle East studies writing to date. Middle East contexts and archives can be found throughout the volume. Her writing on cinema is attentive to what she calls the “Cinematic Orient,” particularly as manifest in the figure of the harem (“Gender and the Culture of Empire”). Elsewhere she queries the image of Cleopatra as it has circulated in contemporary media debates (“Disorienting Cleopatra”), an essay important for the ways it brings questions of race to bear on Orientalist discourses. Many of Shohat’s landmark writings on Zionist discourse and cultural production are reprinted in this volume, the extension of a project that first came to the attention of most U.S. academics with Shohat’s first monograph, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (1987). Her work in this area has been bold and trailblazing, challenging dominant Israeli political paradigms and the prevailing terms by which academics have studied the Zionist project. Shohat’s insistence on reading the Israeli nation–state through a colonial lens has been met with considerable unease among Israeli publics—particularly so in the 1980s, before the Oslo process made such conversations more palatable within the Israeli academy and popular media. In the two decades since, scholars in both the Israeli and U.S. academies have increasingly used the language of colonialism to narrate the Israeli nation-making project. Yet very few scholars working on either Israeli or Palestinian cultural studies have substantially engaged in postcolonial theoretical debates or brought postcolonial analytics to bear on their scholarship—this despite the founding imprint of Edward Said on the postcolonial field. Ella Shohat’s work remains groundbreaking in this regard.