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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2018
This response to Bryan Cheyette’s essay “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora” favorably considers its critique of the problems of foundational and supersessionist thinking in postcolonial enquiry. It supports Cheyette’s claim that postcolonial critique needs better to accommodate the particulars of the Jewish diaspora into its field of vision. It notes how the tendency in some postcolonial critique to approach ideas of nations and diasporas as discrete counterpointed paradigms does not readily capture their complexity and entanglements, and may also contribute unwittingly to the elision of the Jewish diasporic contexts that are not easily mapped within this disciplinary dispensation. Instead, this response advocates a transpositional and productively mobile approach to thinking transfiguratively across and beyond received paradigms to help shape a postcolonial critical sensibility within which matters of Jewish diasporicity might resound more progressively.
1 McKinley, Catherine E., The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts (New York: Counterpoint, 2002), 30 Google Scholar. For an extended reading of the representation of adoption in McKinley’s memoir, see McLeod, John, Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 160–178 Google Scholar.
2 McKinley, The Book of Sarahs, 34.
3 Ibid., 35, 36.
4 Ibid., 61.
5 Jerng, Mark C., Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 88 Google Scholar; emphasis added.
6 McKinley, The Book of Sarahs, 46.
7 This is one of several phrases where I cite from the Cheyette essay included in the present issue.
8 McKinley, The Book of Sarahs, 287.
9 The advent of this phrase can be found in Young, Robert J. C., Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)Google Scholar.
10 Olson, Gary A. and Worsham, Lynn, “Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy,” Race, Rhetoric and the Postcolonial, eds. Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), 3–42 Google Scholar, esp. 16; emphasis added.
11 See Gregory, Derek, The Colonial Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)Google Scholar.
12 We find these mappings often in the work of Neil Lazarus, whose rendition of postcolonial studies both installs and charts perceived tensions between materialist and culturalist (read diasporic) postcolonialisms, very much from the standpoint of the former. See, for example, Lazarus, Neil, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lazarus, Neil, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Alas, not all are as deft and intellectually judicious as Lazarus when critiquing postcolonial studies from a declared materialist position.
13 See McLeod, John, “Postcolonial Studies and the Ethics of the Quarrel,” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 40. 1 (2017): 97–113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Gopinath, Gayatri, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 10 Google Scholar.
15 Eng, David L., The Feeling of Kinship, Queer Liberalism and the Radicalization of Intimacy (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 13 Google Scholar.
16 Williams, Patrick, “‘Outlines of a Better World’: Rerouting Postcolonialism,” Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, eds. Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 86–97 Google Scholar, esp. 91.
17 For more on Phillips’s use of Newton’s Journal of Slave Trader (1787), see Ledent, Bénédicte, Caryl Phillips (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2002), 121–122 Google Scholar.
18 For a detailed reading of “Somewhere in England” in these terms, see McLeod, Life Lines, 197–210.
19 Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 95 Google Scholar.
20 Spencer, Robert, Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 35 Google Scholar.