The course examines otherness and marginality in the Israeli context and how minority literature and art works articulate experience and positions in fashions that challenges power relations and structures. This focus will enable us to examine identity, visibility, and power whereby marginalization, exclusion and control take place in the Israeli culture as a multi-ethnic, national and also transnational community. In reading literary texts and watching films, we will study the juxtaposition of center and periphery as a political position through the writings of women, Mizrahi Jews, Palestinians, the poor, and Holocaust survivors and ask how they influence Israeli culture. Thinking about the politics of inclusion and exclusion, we will explore the changing roles of sovereignty in relation to diaspora and nationalism. Through such considerations we will recognize social structures and values that shape inclusion and marginality, and expand them so as to both include excluded subjects and topics and recognize the potential in hybrid, intersectional and malleable identities in Israeli society. 

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