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

In The Wandering Signifier Erin Graff Zivin charts the beginnings of a much-needed grammar of the representations of Jewishness in Latin American literature. Her book, in other words, is not interested in excavating the presence of "real" Jews or Jewish communities in Latin America in order to establish the basis of a Jewish Latin American identity, but in pursuing the ways Jewishness has been mobilized as a signifier for difference. This is an innovative and masterfully executed project, one that presents the reader with a panoramic view of Latin American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth century from an entirely new angle.

Graff breaks down the function of Jewishness into three levels. The first designates the way "Jewishness" is constructed as a wandering signifier that is infused with meaning based on the needs of the various textual projects. The next level refers to the way Jewishness stands in for "other others." Since ethnic others in Latin America are more often of indigenous or African descent, the figure of the "Jew" has often been mobilized historically to confront various forms of otherness (racial, sexual, religious, national, economic and even metaphysical). For Graff this means not that the "Jew" simply represents another "other" but "rather that it functions as a powerful node onto which a fundamental anxiety toward difference can be projected and performed" (20). The final level indicates the uses of Jewishness to confront the relationship with difference and alterity in the broadest and most abstract sense.

This project is organized not conventionally by historical period, geographic area or even by authors and texts but according to three "critical scenes" that repeat themselves in the Latin American literary archive: diagnosis, transaction, and conversion. Some texts like Julián Martel's La bolsa (1890), Jorge Isaac's María (1867) and Borges's "Emma Sunz" combine more than one of these scenes while in others—José María de Toledo Malta's Madame Pommery (1922) and Clara Beter's Versos de un… (1926) and Margo Glantz's "Zapatos: Andante con variaciones" (1991), for example—Jewishness appears primarily through one of these modalities. While the range of texts is broad, a majority of them come from Argentina and Brazil reflecting the large number of Jews in these countries relative to the rest of Latin America.

Although separated analytically into different chapters, the three scenes overlap in a number of ways. First, a majority of the texts analyzed concern themselves with the construction of imagined communities and seek to work through a variety of threats to this community through the figure of "Jewishness." In this regard diagnosis, transaction, and conversion serve to figure different landscapes and their respective logics (sickness and medical discourse, money, capitalism and modernity and, finally, religion) through which to confront and read these threats. Second, despite their differing logics, when Jewishness appears under the lens of these different scenes it drags with it the quality of liminality. Within the Spanish and Portuguese language traditions, the transition from the relative tolerance and social mixing of Christians, Jews, and Muslims under Muslim rule to the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula and expulsion of Jews in 1492 led to the figure of the converso. The converso, argues Graf, "perhaps best exemplifies the dynamic that within modernity took the form of assimilation and secularization. In both cases, the unrecognizable, hidden Jew was difficult to identify and hence define; thus the seeds of modern ambivalence toward the Jew can be traced back to the fear of the converso" (6). If the "Jew" is a rhetorical figure of liminality then it is because it is linked historically to the Other within, the Other who is "like us" and thus difficult to recognize. Within a constellation organized by sickness and health under the influence of positivism, therefore, Jewishness is not restricted to sickness alone but can appear on the other side of the equation as the diagnosing self or doctor. Such is the case of María...