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Reviewed by:
  • After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America by Robert Zacharias
  • Jesse Hutchison (bio)
Robert Zacharias. After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America. Penn State UP, 2015. 256 pp. ISBN 978-0271070384, $29.95.

After Identity, Robert Zacharias's edited collection of essays on Mennonite writing in North America, is a crucial and timely call for a shift in Mennonite literary criticism.1 The book features twelve papers derived from a 2013 conference of the same name that convincingly argue in favor of turning away from the identity-focused critiques that seek to situate Mennonite literature in a cultural or religious context. Zacharias points out both in his introduction and, in more substantial detail, his earlier book, Rewriting the Break Event, that Mennonite literature, in Canada at least, emerged in an era that saw the marketability of cultural and ethnic difference (Rewriting 42–43). Thus, identity became a central focus as mainstream presses coaxed exoticizing stories of the "Mennonite experience" while critics predominantly viewed minoritized literature through the lens of race and ethnicity.

In his own essay in After Identity, titled "The Mennonite Thing," Zacharias observes that what was especially problematic about the focus on identity was precisely that any notion of an "essential, static, and authentic Mennonite identity" was by nature a reductive depiction that was inevitably "expressed through (but not reducible to) stereotypical markers of Mennonite culture, language and faith" (108). Mennonites and their culture were, consequently, reduced to "quilts, Borscht, head coverings, Zwiebach, and so on" (109). The [End Page 389] negative effects of this kind of stereotyping are obvious, not in the least because "identity remains an issue for people in minority groups if for no other reason than because they keep making fun of us" (196, emphasis in original), as Magdalene Redekop points out in her essay, "'Is Menno in There?'" Critics only reinforce this stereotyping by focusing specifically on the ways in which Mennonite literature serves as an expression of Mennonite identity, yet this theoretical approach has been powerful and consequently hard for critics to shake. Admittedly, my own work on Mennonite life writing has fallen into this trap; however, identity politics have been so dominating that it has been difficult for critics to know precisely where else to take Mennonite literature.

I would suggest that After Identity provides critics with a helpful and much needed new perspective. Indeed, for anyone who wishes to analyze Mennonite literature, After Identity is now a crucial text because of how deftly and succinctly it puts to rest what has been the dominant and increasingly more reductive lens of viewing Mennonite literature since the inception of contemporary Mennonite literary criticism. Those who do not read this text risk falling into outdated traps of viewing Mennonite literature for its expression of an authentic Mennonite culture or identity. Instead, the book offers an array of alternate methods of investigating Mennonite-authored texts, such as Paul Tiessen's fascinating exploration of the publishing politics that went into the production of Rudy Wiebe's Peace Shall Destroy Many, the first major Mennonite novel written in English. Tiessen, examining the first edition's book jacket, points out that the influence of publisher Jack McClelland was so significant that it ultimately produced a heretofore unacknowledged hybrid text of "multiple ownership" (73). Similarly, in "Queering Mennonite Literature," Daniel Shank Cruz argues that focusing specifically "on a single aspect of a person's identity" works to foreclose other modes of identity such as gender, nation, class, and sexuality (143). Shank Cruz considers "hybrid queer-Mennonite identities" in order to, among other things, broaden the scope of queer discourse to incorporate narratives that emphasize the importance of the "moral journey" (144).

For scholars of auto/biography, After Identity does not, unfortunately, include an essay that strictly deals with Mennonite life writing. Spicher Kasdorf's article on "The Autoethnographic Announcement and the Story," however, examines texts that contain a "declaration of identity" that "always erupts as an instance of apparent nonfiction, even in fictional works" (25, emphasis in original). The article reveals that many Mennonite authors have been compelled to explain Mennonitism to their audiences—in effect, giving readers what appears to be the real scoop on...

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