The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (review)

An original contribution to the rising field of Latin American Jewish Studies, The Wandering Signifier represents an intriguing approach to understanding how Latin America negotiates difference by employing the rhetoric of "Jewishness," as a potent and multivalent image and sign, in order to explore broad questions of otherness in Spanish and Portuguese America. Zivin argues that the study of identity politics or the formulation of a Latin American Jewish identity has overlooked how an analysis of rhetorical Jewishness, in the image of the figurative Jew in the Latin imaginary, can serve as a trenchant line of questioning for signaling the ambiguous and ambivalent treatment of difference in Spanish America and Brazil. This critical approach elicits how difference runs the risk of being absorbed into the same in Latin America even when hybrid and multivalent identities are acknowledged.

Notwithstanding the impressive growth of a Jewish Latin American literature, Zivin argues that the shifting and malleable images of the figurative Jew across the panorama of Latin American cultures become highly symbolic and powerful in evoking diverse forms of otherness beyond ethnicity. Underscoring the difference between real and imaginary Jews, primarily via novels and stories, Zivin emphasizes how in Latin American countries with miniscule populations of Jews, the rhetoric of "Jewishness" permeates these cultural landscapes and emerges as a strong or disproportionate presence, an insidious symbolic force due to its proclivity to spark anxiety, hesitation, repulsion, desire, or paranoia in expressed tension with other forms of Latin American and Brazilian otherness.

In writings from diverse national literatures in Spanish and Portuguese, Zivin posits that symbolic "Jewishness" as a mutable signifier, an adaptable vessel, ultimately deconstructs perspectives of otherness as a fixed identity, be it ethnic, racial, sexual, or religious. In this vein, Zivin contends that the figurative presence of Jewishness represents a viable challenge to the notion of cohesive ethnic and national identities. Moreover, in the context of Latin America's history of mestizaje and mestiçagem—real and rhetorical—, Zivin demonstrates how the pliable image of the figurative Jew as a recognized Western sign of otherness, whether, for example, as sage, usurer, scapegoat, or traitor, was already implanted in the Latin imaginary even prior to the Encounter and as a porous or chameleonic agent interacts directly or obliquely with the processes of Latin American hybridity or syncretism, especially in dealing with or ambivalently acknowledging difference on real as well as on imaginary and mythic levels, as in the myth of racial democracy in Brazil.

By drawing upon the constructed nature of "Jewishness" as a rhetorical device that generates diverse and flexible images of otherness, marginality, exclusion, and alterity in general, that is, beyond referential manifestations of Jewish culture, Zivin's study focuses primarily on this rhetoric as it manifests itself in literature by non-Jewish writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Machado de Assis, Mario Vargas Llosa, Rubén Darío, and others, along with a few writers such as Jorge Isaacs, Carlos Heitor Cony and Margo Glantz whose connections to Judaism are not unproblematic. Since ethnic identity in Latin America is often considered to be situational or circumstantial, thereby pointing to the danger of grounding any specific or characteristic Jewish identity or discourse, Zivin's approach is useful for understanding how Jews straddle several identity spaces, thereby putting into question the validity of a "them-versus-us" gestalt. Zivin sees the figurative presence of Jewishness as a challenge to traditional formulations of identity since this rhetoric repeatedly and insistently affirms the "unavoidable heterogeneity" in Latin America.

Theoretical approaches from semiotics and post-structuralism to postmodernism drive Zivin's thinking based upon writings by Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Zygmunt Bauman, Max Nordau, and Slavoj Zizek, among others. These approaches, especially Levinas's concept on the Subject's face-to-face responsibility for the Other as a fundamental structure of subjectivity, are presented with the aim of tracing the ethical and particularly the esthetic representation of the Other...