Imagining Cosmopolitanism, Conviviality, and Coexistence in World Literature: Jews, Muslims, Language, and Enchantment in Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat

This essay analyzes Joann Sfar's Rabbi's Cat and Rabbi's Cat 2 through the concepts of conviviality and world literature, drawing on the scholarship of Paul Gilroy and Pheng Cheah. I argue that Sfar offers through a decolonial lens a "world literature" with a normative world-making vision (Cheah) that asserts specific convivialities of what is deemed mutually exclusive under colonialism and in its aftermath, such as Jew and Muslim; native, diasporic, and colonial languages; and the rational-secular and "the enchanted."