No promised land: The diasporic poetics of A. C. Jacobs

Abstract

Abstract Any discussion of the relative utopian and dystopian characteristics of Jewish life and literature in Britain begs the question of a category in-between, a third space, that could illuminate both the key terms of the binary and, perhaps, lead into fruitful new avenues of thought. The ‘spatial turn’ in critical discourse, especially as deployed by Homi Bhabha and other postcolonial critics in the 1990s, has been useful across disciplines, from anthropology to literary study, as a way to discuss underlying (sometimes deliberately repressed) and often difficult to articulate experiences and ideas. It can also be useful in enacting ‘the density, texture, and force of a lived cultural poetics’, as American anthropologist Kathleen Stewart does in her 1996 book, A Space on the Side of the Road. With this image of a ‘cultural poetics’ in mind, as well as an awareness of the possibilities inherent in third-space approaches to reading texts, this article contributes to the discussions of literary British Jewish utopias/dystopias, as well as Jewish Studies and anthropological and cultural studies approaches to literature, by reintroducing the work of a little-read but highly significant Scottish Jewish poet, Arthur (A. C.) Jacobs (1937–1994). Jacobs found neither utopia nor dystopia in Britain, his birth-home, nor in Israel, his ostensible homeland. Yet, his poems and other writings, written in English and sprinkled here and there with Yiddish and Scots, articulate what I can only describe as a Jewish diasporic poetics, a cultural space in which questions of language, place and identity hover, never quite coming to rest.