Colonizing Jewishness? Minority, exile, and belonging in Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay and Caryl Phillips's The Nature of Blood

Abstract

In this essay, I contend that aligning tropes associated with Jewish identity and (post)colonial identity is essential to open up new comparative frameworks. However, I do not see this comparison as resting on the facile idea of the Jew as a ‘cosmopolitan’ figure who can easily travel between contexts and locations. Rather, I argue that the experience of the Jew as a minority is the most productive framework for comparisons with majorities that have been dispossessed and marginalized as a result of colonialism and racism. Jewishness functions as a means to demonstrate the universal nature of conditions such as exile and belonging while preserving the political and historical specificity of the minority groups under discussion. By situating the ‘Jew’ as a representative of the European minority par excellence in a (post)colonial setting, Desai and Phillips illustrate the historical links between Jewish minority identity and postcolonial identity in their novels but they equally tease out the impact of other marginalized groups on Jewish identity formation. Hence, I suggest that these novels propose a dialectical approach to Jewishness as both minority and majority that can be considered as a model for bridging the theoretical gap between postcolonial and Jewish studies.