This response to Bryan Cheyette’s essay “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora” favorably considers its critique of the problems of foundational and supersessionist thinking in postcolonial enquiry. It supports Cheyette’s claim that postcolonial critique needs better to accommodate the particulars of the Jewish diaspora into its field of vision. It notes how the tendency in some postcolonial critique to approach ideas of nations and diasporas as discrete counterpointed paradigms does not readily capture their complexity and entanglements, and may also contribute unwittingly to the elision of the Jewish diasporic contexts that are not easily mapped within this disciplinary dispensation. Instead, this response advocates a transpositional and productively mobile approach to thinking transfiguratively across and beyond received paradigms to help shape a postcolonial critical sensibility within which matters of Jewish diasporicity might resound more progressively.
