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

Bryan Cheyette’s recent book contains chapters on paired authors Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, and another on Primo Levi and Jean Amery; individual chapters on Muriel Spark, Philip Roth, and Salman Rushdie; and a Conclusion that surveys briefly the work of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Anita Desai, and Zadie Smith. The Introduction contains extended meditations on Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, and V. S. Naipaul. His planes of analysis oscillate between what he terms cosmopolitanism and nationalism, a binary mediated by the quintessentially Jewish notion of diaspora. The goal of the comparative project is both to restore to Jewish writing a strong sense of its connection to decolonization (postcolonial), a cosmopolitan urge to identify with victims of imperialism and fascism in the wake of World War II, and to reimagine a sense of Jewish nationhood that would not be overtly Zionist, racist, and presumably anti-Palestinian. Thus we have the tension between a desire for safe homeland and a desire for worldliness as embodied in universal humanists such as Fanon, Said, and Arendt, with all the contradictions these entail. This would be a most welcome reconciliation between Jewish and postcolonial writing. I will limit my comments to discussion of postcolonial writers for readers of Philip Roth Studies, for whom presumably the Jewish writers are better-known.

Cheyette’s paradigmatic figure for the tension between home and world is the luftmensch or “airman” of Yiddish lore, “(a vagrant or rootless cosmopolitan) [. . .] which constructed East European Jews as hapless ‘air-people’ in need of national salvation” (xiv). The word is deeply ambivalent, signaling this tension, as it was “co-opted by the Nazis to characterize Jews as rootless cosmopolitans and essentially parasitic” (xiv). Yet the luftmensch is also uniquely privileged, like Benjamin’s flâneur, by virtue of his freedom and peripatetic nature, able to wander distractedly through the banquet of urban life. Sometimes Cheyette favors this, at other times fears it. Cheyette’s desire is to re-identify several seminal figures of the postcolonial canon (Fanon, Said, Rushdie, Naipaul) with a parallel Jewish canon (Arendt, Roth, Spark, Levi), who are both similarly diasporic (or exilic) and yearning simultaneously towards both cosmopolitanism and nationalism. These tensions animate each of the chapters, and each author (or pair) navigates these polarities in a distinctive voice and with a distinctive solution.

Theoretically, Cheyette proposes “a new form of metaphorical thinking (defined as seeing ‘similarities in dissimilars’ after Aristotle)” that will reunite the “intertwined histories of fascism and imperialism” (xiii). He wishes to reintegrate creative fiction writers with others more engaged with social sciences, such as Said, Fanon, Arendt, Memmi, and Levi, and to rearticulate the Jewish and postcolonial canons as they purportedly existed “immediately after the Second World War,” when, he claims, “anti-colonial thinkers naturally included the aftermath of Nazism in their analysis of colonialism and those who were imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps looked in part to the victims of colonialism to understand their experiences” (xiii). A compelling rationale for this move—which is historically debatable, and not really supported by evidence—is that “academic specialization [. . .] has increasingly separated out these analogous histories,” resulting in “disciplinary uniqueness [. . .] which results in an inability to embrace the dissimilar” (xiv). Cheyette admits “a risk in engaging in metaphorical thinking” that he terms “the anxiety of appropriation” (xiv), of turning others into metaphors and erasing their historical specificity. I agree with his synthetic aims but basically disagree with his method and his evidence.

I cite from the Preface at length because it pithily distills the theoretical focus, a focus that does not necessarily emerge as clearly over the course of the rest of the book. In the main text, contradictions continually mount within the thicket of close readings. In the Introduction we find that there is “an unsung example of the repressed Jewish other within Postcolonial Studies, who [. . .] prefigures the contemporary vilification of those who are deemed [End...