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

Erin Graff Zivin's groundbreaking book The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary has arrived at a time when the field of Latin American Jewish studies is gaining visibility. Recent years have seen the publication of several compilations of essays on this topic.¹ Graff Zivin's book stands out as the first comprehensive analysis of representations of "Jews" and "Jewishness" in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American literature. The author uses scare quotes to indicate the constructedness of this category of identity. This is especially important in a book whose author traces the nuances and flexibility of the concepts of the "Jew" and "Jewishness" with the intention of examining the complexities and limits of their representations.

The Wandering Signifier fills a void in the fields of Latin American and Jewish studies with an original, intelligent, and well-researched study of the problems of representing constructions of Jewish identity from a cultural, ideological, racial, and political perspective. Graff Zivin looks at the figure of the "Jew" in the literature of Latin American countries, where the majority of ethnic others are of indigenous and African descent. That is why her analysis of representations of "Jews" extends to other groups in Latin America that do not have agency. In her words, the " 'Jew' . . . functions as a powerful node onto which a fundamental anxiety toward difference can be projected and performed" (20).

In the introduction, the author recreates the long and difficult history of representations of Jews from the Middle Ages in Europe to Latin America today. She also summarizes the critical literature on the subject and adds a brief history of the presence of Jews in Latin America. Then she begins the challenging task of comparing Jews and their cultural representation, which has so often resulted in anti-Semitism. However, this book does not attempt to correct the category of "Jewishness," for the author does not believe in such essentialist identity categories.

The title The Wandering Signifier refers to the rhetorical malleability and multiplicity of shape, significance, and meaning that "Jews" and "Jewish" identity take as they are transformed by authors within specific social and historical contexts. The wandering signifier is a particularly effective metaphor because not only does it imply the versatility of the "Jew" as a character in this body of literature—and previously in European literature—but it also points at the "symbolic life" of "Jews" and "Jewishness" in these writings.

Graff Zivin questions the ethics of representation that stem from the examination of literary texts that appropriate the "Jewish" other to the realm of sameness. With this purpose in mind, she introduces Emmanuel Levinas's groundbreaking philosophical concept of the ethical relationship between self and other. Levinas believes that written literature inevitably objectifies the other. While his philosophy inspired Graff Zivin's book, she questions his radical distinction between ethical and rhetorical language by highlighting the ways in which they overlap. The last chapter, "The Limits of Representation," delves into this issue.

The Wandering Signifier discusses the presence of "Jews" and "Jewishness" in canonical as well as lesser-known works by Jewish and non-Jewish authors. It is divided into three parts, each centering on the themes and tropes of diagnosis, transactions, and conversions. The first chapter explores the importance of positivism in nineteenth-century Latin America and the central presence of Max Nordau among Latin American intellectuals of the time. She also looks at the interconnectedness of representations of Jews and the pathological discourse in European culture since the Middle Ages and in Latin American literature since the nineteenth century. She discusses these themes in Jorge Isaacs's María, Julián Martel's La bolsa, José Asunción Silva's De sobremesa, Rodolfo Enrique Fogwills's Vivir afuera, Rubén Darío's Los raros...