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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2018
This article forms a response to Bryan Cheyette’s essay in this journal, “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora,” and focuses on the dialectics of comparing minority experiences in a climate of implicit and explicit violence toward minorities. Agreeing with Cheyette’s invocation of such threatening environments, I speak to what he characterizes as the importance of nonbinary thinking by gesturing to similar work unfolding in Black studies, specifically in the theorization of anti-Blackness and the work of Christina Sharpe. I end with a brief discussion of the Modern Jewish-Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel to focalize the practice of the comparative work between Jewish and postcolonial studies in threatening environments. I argue that Ezekiel’s approach highlights the “fluidity” and in-built multiplicity of such environments, and so undermines the seemingly rigidity of violent and singular binaries.
1 Cheyette, Bryan, “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry 4.3 (2017): 424–439 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Goetschel, Willi and Quayson, Ato, “Introduction: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry 3.1 (2016): 1–9 Google Scholar.
2 Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking,” 426, 438.
3 Ibid., 425, 426.
4 Ibid., 426, 438.
5 Ibid., 430, 439.
6 Ibid., 425.
7 Ezekiel, Nissim, Collected Poems (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 244 Google Scholar.
8 Sarang, Vilas, Indian English Poetry Since 1950: An Anthology. (Mumbai: Disha Books, 2004), 18 Google Scholar.
9 Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 260.
10 Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking,” 425.
11 See Dirlik, Arif, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20.2 (1994): 328–356 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Quayson, Ato, “Comparative Postcolonialisms: Storytelling and Community in Sholem Aleichem and Chinua Achebe,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry 3.1 (2016): 57, 58 Google Scholar.
13 Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking,” 430. Furthermore, Cheyette’s distinction between an “institutionalized postcolonial studies” and “morally imaginative” writers like Salman Rushdie may indeed be an unsustainable one. As Neil Lazarus writes, “I am tempted to overstate the case, for purposes of illustration, and declare that there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. That author is Salman Rushdie, whose novels—especially Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses—are endless and fatuously cited in the critical literature as testifying to the imagined-ness—that is to say, ideality—of nationhood, the ungeneralizable subjectivism of memory and experience, the instability of social identity, the volatility of truth, the narratorial constructedness of history, and so on.” Lazarus, Neil, “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism,” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, eds. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 424 Google Scholar.
14 Katz, Ethan B., Leff, Lisa Moses, and Mandel, Maud S., eds., Colonialism and the Jews (Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 2017), 2 Google Scholar. Quoted in Cheyette, “Against Superseccionist Thinking,” 425.
15 Cheyette similarly makes the distinction between early comparative projects conducted by writers from colonized countries and Jewish intellectuals immediately following the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the more recent comparative projects that attempt to bridge two “disciplinary boundaries.” See Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking,” 427.
16 Ibid., 425.
17 Mufti, Aamir R., Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
18 Quayson, Ato and Mufti, Aamir R., “The Predicaments of Postcolonial Thinking,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.1 (2016): 152 Google Scholar.
19 Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking,” 426.
20 Cheyette praises Mufti’s non-reductive analysis at a number of points in the essay. See, for example, Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking,” 434.
21 Ibid., 427.
22 Ibid., 428. See also Badiou, Alain, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 102–103 Google Scholar.
23 Sharpe, Christina, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Quayson and Mufti, “The Predicaments of Postcolonial Thinking,” 152.
25 Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking,” 425.
26 Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 3, 59 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking,” 437.
28 Ibid., 437.
29 Ibid., 437, 439.
30 Ibid., 439.
31 In choosing Sharpe to place in a dialectical relationship with Cheyette, I take my cue from Cheyette, who, for better or for worse, focuses primarily on examples from US history and culture when unpacking the difficulties with and resonances of the terms ghetto and diaspora.
32 Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking,” 425 and Sharpe, In the Wake, 106.
33 One need only recall the well-known incident where, in 2009, the noted Black scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested in front of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His neighbors assumed he was attempting to break-in to his own house and called the police.
34 Quoted in Sharpe, In the Wake, 8.
35 Ibid., 100, 101. For Sharpe’s discussion of “Aspiration” see 108-113.
36 Sharpe shares Cheyette’s interest in the centrality of “forgetting” in accounts of both the Holocaust and North American Slavery. See Ibid., 69.
37 Ibid., 11.
38 Ibid., 11.
39 Ibid., 11, 12.
40 Goetschel and Quayson, “Introduction: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism,” 6.
41 Suchoff, David, “The Hidden Rabe: Kafka’s Openings and Beckett’s Cage,” The Germanic Review, 90 (2015): 124 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
42 Cheyette, “Against,” 432. Cheyette, Bryan, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the nightmare of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 Sharpe, In the Wake, 123.
44 Ibid., 124.
45 Ibid., 22.
46 Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking,” 434.
47 Both Rushdie and Ezekiel were working on literary experiments with “Indian English” around the same time—Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children came out in 1981, and Ezekiel’s experiments with Indian English first caused a stir with the poem “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.” in the collection Hymns in Darkness (1976). See Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 190.
48 De Souza, Eunice, Talking Poems: Conversation with Poets (New Delhi: Oxford, 1999), 107 Google Scholar.
49 Ibid., 5.
50 Suchoff, David, Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 10, 12 Google Scholar.
51 All the poems I discuss in this section come from Ezekiel’s last book of poetry, Latter-Day Psalms (1982).
52 Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 237–38.
53 Ibid., 252.
54 Ibid., 257.
55 Suchoff, Kafka’s Jewish Languages, 203.