Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History by Bryan Cheyette (review)

Abstract

Cheyette, Bryan. 2014. Diasporas of Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and Nightmare of History. New Haven: Yale University Press. $55.00 hc. 306 pp.There should be no need for this book an ideal world, writes Bryan Cheyette Diasporas of Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and Nightmare of History (xii). This is so not simply because an ideal world would preclude nightmare histories of empire and colonization, New World slavery, anti-Semitism, and around which this book circles, but also-in meaning Cheyette intends-because such a world would not admit disciplinary barriers that have oddly estranged these histories from one another, rendering them mutually incomparable subjects of study.However, within world as given this illuminating, elegantly written book makes a kind of ideal contribution: breaching academic barriers and offering a powerful example of an unruly, extra-disciplinary study that will inspire others. Yet it may behoove us to pause and ask, part with Cheyette, why Jewish/black/postcolonial boundary isn't more often transgressed contemporary critique. Why do contemporary academic disciplines tend to stress specific histories of victimhood and exile, as Cheyette writes (2014, 19), rather than treat, as Frantz Fanon put it when linking of Nazi genocide to those of European colonization, the common wretchedness of different men, common enslavement of extensive social groups (quoted Cheyette 2014, 59)? Though term diaspora, long associated with Jewish experience, has come to name many modern population dispersions-the postcolonial above all- connections between postcolonial and Jewish diasporas have diminished contemporary discourse. Scholars of postcolonial and of Jewish studies operate distinct circuits, seldom sharing critical texts, terms, and assumptions that mark a common project.While Cheyette cites postcolonial thinkers (Paul Gilroy and Caryl Phillips) who assert that public representations of enabled other minorities and histories of oppression to be articulated (2014, 36), he also argues that postcolonial studies has generally expunged interconnections with Jewish history and Holocaust under rubric of a dominant white 'Judeo-Christian' Western culture (24-25). In other words, postcolonial studies tends to position Jews within imperial cultural dominant, undifferentiated from other European and American whites, rather than within excluded and oppressed margins-a positioning that reflects postwar changes world status of Jews more than it does self-conception of many individual Jews. Because of such political distinctions, and perhaps also because of fatigue with Jewish historical claims attending diaspora, Cheyette writes that some self-designated 'new' disciplines-such as Diaspora Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Ethnic and Racial Studies-defined themselves as superseding a Jewish history that is constructed as age-old or 'classic,' and thus as no longer quite relevant (38, invoking Hilary Mantel). Indeed, an intriguing thread this book is hypothesis that postcolonial studies has a repressed Jewish other-the rootless cosmopolitan vagrant, or luftmensh, a figure harder to champion than nationalist, anticolonial insurgent (22).Meanwhile, Cheyette notes among scholars of Jewish studies fear . . . that such metaphorical thinking-where similar and dissimilar become blurred-will dilute Jewish particularity, which is held to be of particular importance in name of protecting memory of victims (39). Cheyette calls this the anxiety of appropriation, especially relation to histories of racial victimization (xiv). A related, problematic tendency takes European anti-Semitism and especially as a world-historical model of racism, with all forms of historical oppression expected to fit into this framework (37). …