After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America ed. by Robert Zacharias (review)

As an outsider-insider to the southern Manitoba Mennonite literary community, I have listened from the sidelines to many debates about Mennonite writing and its necessarily shifting parameters. After Identity is a timely book for diasporic studies in general and for the study of Mennonite writing in particular because it worries a thorny question that has stubbornly endured in Mennonite writing studies from the boom in Mennonite writing in the 1980s—what Andris Taskans first called "the Mennonite miracle" (Zacharias 15 n1). The epigraph that leads off the introduction, from poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf's "Mennonites," sums up the question of what comes after the miracle: "This is why we cannot leave the beliefs,/ or what else would we be?" (quoted in Zacharias 1). What else indeed? As Zacharias notes later in his essay, the question is not merely rhetorical but something much more agitating: "a radical invitation for us to reconsider the foundational narratives and markers of our collective identity" (114). Kasdorf, whose tart examination of the insistence upon "autoethnographic announcement" within Mennonite literature leads off the collection, takes up the question to parse what postidentity may be for Mennonite/s writing, and Mennonite/s living (21). Take, for example, the identifying sentence with which I began. While it is a standard critical strategy for situating oneself within a particular discourse, claiming "outsider-insider" status is also vulnerable to and mired in the ideological twist of what Zacharias calls "the Mennonite Thing" via Zizek's revealing of the fetishizing ideology that powers the "Ethnic Thing" (106). Such moves, failures, definitions, declarations, identity negotiations, and refusals are all part of the "Menonite identity crisis," to use Calvin Redekop's phrase (2) and are boldly examined in the literary landscape by Zacharias and the critics whose essays he has collected in this volume.

After Identity takes as its central premise the enduring premise and just as enduring problem of cultural authenticity; the propinquity with and refusal of cultural separatism creates "the Mennonite Thing," a refusal of not so much of "the beliefs" but, rather, of the beliefs as solitary definition of Mennonite identity. Zacharias notes that texts may, and do, ironically, comically, cynically exploit "the Mennonite Thing" for its market value as with popular cultural products, like Rhoda Janzen's Mennonite in a Little Black Dress or tlc's cable series Breaking Amish, or offer literary resistance to what a "Mennonite text" ought to be, as satirized and dismantled in works like David Waltner-Toews's Tante Tina poems or Jeff Gundy's much-anthologized "How to Write the New Mennonite Poem." A growing consciousness of the "Mennonite Thing" as something that can attract and/or repel readers with a set of expectations about "the beliefs" has produced, Zacharias notes, "an essentialized and decontextualized Mennonite identity" that may be "self-consciously invoked, exposed, and explored, a process through which it is reanimated as identity for a post-identity age" (107).

It is to the credit of Zacharias's editorial leadership that many contributors to the anthology are well-known critics in the study of Mennonite writing and that they take up the question of postidentity with such vigour. The collection is refreshingly free of the kind of conservative criticism that has sometimes plagued—and, frankly, has sometimes limited—this community of study. I understand that literature that has emerged from a separatist tradition needs to speak to that history, but the nagging question about what happens to those who do not fit in has been a question at least from Rudy Wiebe's Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), was the driving force of Friesen's poetic and dramatic narrative The Shunning (1980), and was absolutely essential for feminist Mennonite writers, especially Di Brandt's first book questions I asked my mother (recently re-issued by Turnstone Press), Kasdorf's Sleeping Preacher, and Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness (2004), books that were popular outside of Mennonite communities partially because of their transgressions...