Israeli Literature in the 21st Century The Transcultural Generation: An Introduction

This volume makes a bold claim—that there is a new generation of Israeli writers, born since the 1970s, who began publishing in the 2000s, and whose writings, though diverse in subject and form, reveal distinct characteristics that suggest cohesion. The defining characteristic of this generation is its transcultural identity, and it has moved away from the singular cultural model of a national literature, defined by Wolfgang Welsch as “social homogenization, ethnic consolidation and intercultural delimitation,”¹ which in Israeli terms meant the anticipated assimilation of individuals into Israel’s national culture, emerging a product of it, compliant with its folkist identity and the Hebrewism that shaped it. Despite the prominence of the melting-pot ideology, Israel’s polyethnic state never overcame its rich diversity of ethnic, cultural, social and religious backgrounds—even as it encouraged the suppression of identities outside of the dominant national vision. The pushback against the erasure of conflicting and marginalized identities ultimately resulted in an explosion of multiculturalism, and today’s writers come from a variety of overlapping cultures and identities. However, this plurality has evolved since the era of radical ethnic politics and should not be mistaken as a sign of multiculturalism or globalization; a problematic pairing that is facing increasing delegitimization. If multiculturalism validates all groups, offering spaces to otherwise excluded minorities, it does so at the price of a fragmented ethnic and gendered landscape which, according to Mikhail Epstein, offers multiple opaque cultural enclaves, in danger of existing separately from one another, in isolation. Globalization, in turn, offers the erasure of distinct particularities through the cultural imperialism of pan-Americanism:

The world may even be moving toward a combination of these two determinisms: one horizontal and the other vertical, the former represented by American globalism (“mass culture”) and the latter by multiculturalism, also of the same American type (“the pride of minorities”). However, when two grim prospects are brought together, neither of them gets any brighter.²

Adopting Fernando Ortiz’s notion of transculturation allows us to consider these writers as innovators who simultaneously work within their native culture and language (Hebrew/Israel) while engaging and experimenting with other foreign cultures they encounter—whether through travel (real or imagined), or their own heritage.³ For Ortiz the term transculturalism contained an implicit negativity towards a lost cultural identity. He imagined five stages of transformation as an invading culture slowly eviscerated a native culture. Yet culture is more problematic than his conception of it in the 1940s. Rather, it can be better imagined as a two-way street in which constant back and forth destabilizes the notion of any single culture. Instead, unique attributes between cultures are fused together to create innumerable new forms of cultural hybridity. Nor is this cultural fusion the exclusive result of colonialism, or cultural imperialism (even of the ubiquitous Americanization of global culture), rather, it is the recognition that encounters with other cultures become a transformative experience, one which offers writers both the opportunity to look outwards and to reflect inwards. Transculturalism seeks to avoid the polarizing boundaries set by multiculturalism and the encroaching homogenization of globalization. Instead it allows writers to experience their own culture(s) from a distance by estranging the national experience from a predetermined discourse, even if only in their imagination. Thus today’s understanding of transcultural avoids the trappings of binaries, while moving beyond Ortiz’s original conceptualization of dominant and subordinate cultures—rather, the transcultural points overlap offering a confluence of cultures, which thereby reject the specifically national/ethnic or the individualization of the multicultural. As Epstein explains:

Transculture is a different model of cultural development, an alternative to both leveling globalism and isolating pluralism. . . . [it] is a new sphere of cultural development that transcends the border of traditional cultures (ethnic, national, racial, religious, gender, sexual, and professional). Transculture overcomes the isolation of their symbolic systems and value determinations and broadens the field of “supra-cultural” creativity. We acquire transculture at the boundaries of our own culture and at the crossroads with other cultures through the risky experience of our own cultural wanderings...