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124 12 History’s Traces Personal Narrative, Diaspora, and the Arab Jewish Experience Kyla Wazana Tompkins In this essay Kyla Wazana Tompkins looks at the politics of feminist autobiography in terms of the specific intersections of race, gender, and diaspora that construct the Arab Jewish experience. She theorizes the possibility of an Arab Jewish experience that is oriented not toward or through Zionism but rather in the politically and culturally productive possibilities of diaspora. I was asked to write this piece, theorizing my experience as a non-European or Arab Jew, in the fall of 2005, but it took me quite a while to make myself sit down and write. In one of my initial e-mail exchanges with my dear friend Evelyn Alsultany , she wrote: “I know that theorizing personal experience induces nausea for you, but I think you have an important contribution to make around your experience on how few people (both Jews and non-Jews) get that one can be an Arab Jew.” To which I replied: “Well, as you know, nausea for me usually masks raging ambivalence. So this should be an interesting place to explore.”1 I am marking this ambivalence because I want to be clear that I have mixed feelings about selfnarration as a genre of feminist writing, such that, as you can see, I am hesitating before beginning. Life writing has a hallowed place in feminist theory, both as a liberatory practice and as a teaching tool. Chandra Talpade Mohanty has discussed the importance of “testimonials, life stories, and oral histories [as] a significant mode of remembering and recording experiences and struggles.” Writing, she argues, “often becomes the context through which new political identities are formed.”2 These genres have been both politicizing for those women who have read these texts and recognized themselves and educational for those women for whom these texts functioned as doorways into subjectivities of which they had not previously conceived. History’s Traces | 125 Life writing and autobiography assert the political importance of memory and agency as rhetorically and methodologically opposed to the otherwise hegemonic practices of History (with a big H, in which the canonized written record serves as the only record through which the past becomes visible) and Anthropology (in which the third world subject becomes visible as the subject of a first world gaze, a gaze that has typically identified the third world subject as bound to tradition). As such, autoethnography, the writing of one’s life story into public visibility, is a hallowed and important genre of feminist writing, one that emerged directly out of the tradition of consciousness raising, and, as Mary Louise Pratt has written, postcolonial resistance.3 The other narrative genre that this mode of feminist writing comes out of is the nineteenth-century sentimental novel. In the United States the tradition of politicization through feminist writing goes back to the women’s novels of the nineteenth century and the political movements to which they were tied. In particular , I am thinking of the early white women’s feminist and abolitionist movement in which, to quote Christine Stansell, “women emerged into the public through novels long before they emerged politically.” The reading politics of these novels encouraged women to feel, to identify and sympathize with the other in spite of difference, a politic that has been criticized by feminist critics in recent years for flattening out and obscuring the differences between subject and object of sympathy and thus upholding asymmetrical relationships.4 Despite Gloria Anzaldúa’s radical intervention into the politics of identity , with her groundbreaking essay “La Concienza de la Mestiza,” in which she asserts the fluid and strategic self-making of intersectional identities, many women’s studies classrooms continue to use first-person narratives by women of color as positivist testimony and, worse, as an instrumentalization of suffering that facilitates the dream of diversity while reducing the work of understanding difference to the sentimental pleasures of witnessing someone else’s injury.5 Using writing by women of color solely in terms of the “realm of the experiential ” implicitly makes the claim, as bell hooks has written, that writing by women of color has “no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory.”6 Thus, an unfair burden of realism is placed upon writers of color in both literature and women’s studies classes. In classrooms where faculty are under pressure to provide coverage, that is, to provide visibility to as many subject positions as possible...

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