The Violence of the Hyphen in Judeo-Christian

Abstract

I would like to take note of violence of hyphen in some contemporary uses of phrase Judeo-Christian.* My principal contention is that this phrase is being deployed in criticism of colonial and post-colonial discourse in a mytho-pathological way that disjoins Jewishness from social and political practices of Jews and conjoins it to a generalized notion of the West so as to construct a generic post-colonial Other. The larger issue, which I seek to address within this frame, is structure of discourse of post-colonialism or critique and resemblance that persists in that discourse between hyphen that passes Jew into and hyphen that, proclaiming at once passing and persistence of a colonial past, retains native in post-colonial as an internalized memory of his or her formerly subjugated self. By examining relations across hyphen, between Jew and what is called Judeo-Christian heritage on one hand, and between post-colonial and colonial experience on other, I want to explore way in which hyphen serves development of ideologically reified representations of and postcolonial subjects and to explore impact of these reifications on social relations between and among people so described. By reviewing together relations of Judeo-Christian and PostColonial hyphen, I hope to show that Post-Colonial hyphen joins once colonialized subject to an interiorized ideological construct of himself or herself as Other, in a way that is discursively homologous to subsumption of Jewish history into putatively present. Moreover, I want to suggest that similarity in rhetorical form of two hyphens provides for a seductive chiasmus at which Judeois superimposed on colonial to identify Jew with persistence of subjugated other within post-colonial self.