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Next Year in the Diaspora: The Uneasy Articulation of Transcultural Positionality in Achy Obejas's Days ofAwe* DaraE. Goldman is Assistant Professor of Spanish at University oflllinoü at UrbanaChampaign specializing in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Hispanic Caribbean and Latin American literatures and cultures, gender and sexuality studies and cultural studies. She is computing a book, Out of Bounds: Charting the Rhetoric of Hispanic Caribbean Insularity , and is the author of several recent and forthcoming articles on the construction of spatiality in contemporary Hispanic Caribbean literary and cultural production. Her current work focuses on the transcultural narrativity of queer Latina literature. Heaven has always been a reflection of humanity, populated by images that are serene, joyful, or vengeful, depending on whether their creators live in peace, in the fullness of our senses, or in slavery and torment; each shake-up of history alters the nation's Olympus. —José MartÃ- (translation by Achy Obejas), quoted from the epigraph to Days of Awe A Diaspora by Any Other Name I have often been asked how or why I first chose to work on Caribbean literatures and cultures. Given the relatively common tendency to choose an area of specialization based on a personal connection with the subject matter, the question sometimes take a form such as, "So how did a Jewish girl from New York become a Caribbeanist?" To such inquiries, I have been known to respond, "Well, I suppose I just took a wrong turn at diaspora." Along with its intended playful humor, this response calls attention to a fundamental question within comparative ethnic studies: to what extent are migratory patterns among diverse socio-cultural groups homologous or even equivalent? More specifically, the idea of a "wrong turn at diaspora" alludes to a particular trajectory or cultural pattern in which the progress of one community is being substituted for another. It inevitably points to the absence of a proper turn, a progressive teleology within which this cross-cultural identification constitutes a detour or digression. The idea of diaspora itself, and Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 8, 2004 60 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies its deployment with ethnic and cultural studies, reinforces this presumption. I would like to suggest, therefore, that this anecdote gestures towards a larger critical trend. Ruth Behar's film, Adio kerida, includes several moments in which she explores the relationship between her own position as both Cuban and Jewish and larger queries (and, in some cases, conclusions ) about the Jewish communities in Cuba. Of course, this interweaving of the personal and the professional is hardly surprising . After all, Behar is an anthropologist and has published metacritical reflections on the discipline in works such as The Vulnerable Observer. Moreover, Adio kerida is explicitly framed as a Cuban-Sephardic journey that emerges from Behar's personal and family history. Consequently, the intercalation of auto-ethnography in her analysis is almost inevitable. Yet the questions Behar poses about her own subjectivity and its theoretical implications are not limited to works that are overtly (auto) ethnographic. In the introduction to her book, Proceed with Caution, Doris Sommer comments on her personal experiences growing up in New York and how these might inform practices of (multicultural ) reading: During my own childhood in New York, we had a bad name for Jews who were so embarrassed by ethnicity that they chose not to claim it. They were 'white Jews,' troubled and untrustworthy . Whatever Utopian or democratizing ideals may have tempted us all toward assimilation, 'whitening' was, to many of us, a hasty price for a distant prize. So instead, like Garcilaso and like the Jewish philosopher of love whom he chose to translate, we preferred to weave back and forrh, glad to fit into universal culture when we could, but loadi to give up the anchor of a 'native ' condition. [...] My 'mosaic' New York sometimes showed volatile cultural conditions rhat demanded acknowledgment and negotiation. (xiv) On the one hand, of course, these comments point to the rhetorical project oÃ- Proceed with Caution. Sommer is commenting on the complex combination of desire and resistance toward universalism in minority writing. That is, although complexity and irreducibility have often been valued in canonical literature, she underscores a...

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