The State of Afterness

The State of Afterness traces the histories and cultural histories of contemporary music in Israel since the 1980s and through the 2020s. With afterness defined as the state of being unconditioned by territorialism while opting for previously unavailable temporalities and ethnographies, Assaf Shelleg studies the compositional approaches that record the attenuation of territorial nationalism, and assembles a network of composers trained in the post-ideological climate of the 1970s and 80s. This network features operas, electronic music, orchestral, and chamber and ensemble works by Chaya Czernowin, Betty Olivero, Luciano Berio, Leon Schidlowsky, Josef Bardanashvili, and Arik Shapira, in addition to Jewish oral musical traditions and novels by David Grossman, A. B. Yehoshua, Yishai Sarid, and Ruby Namdar. While in previous eras the statist subject superseded or subsumed any competing political project, since the 1980s such self-referential acts have been losing their ability to confer homogeneity and project the monologic of national Hebrew culture and its telos. As a result, Shelleg writes, the composers discussed in this book do not form a cohesive group, yet they share constituent cultural and historical sensibilities: they opt for diasporism irrespective of their compositional approaches but refrain from universalizing Jewish diasporas (as did classic Zionism); they display postmodern patrimonies but reject their essentialist qualities; they admonish their country's ethnocracy and democratic façade; they denationalize Holocaust memorialization; and they narrate the failure of territorial nationalism. In this sense, the state of afterness is a drama still etched in our everyday.

Musicologist Assaf Shelleg (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is the author of Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project (OUP 2020) and Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History (OUP 2014), which received the 2016 AJS Jordan Schnitzer Book Prize (Association for Jewish Studies) and the 2015 Joel Engel Prize for the Study of Hebrew Music. Shelleg is a music contributor for Haaretz, and has previously served as the director of the Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the State of Israel at The Hebrew University, and as a curator for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.