This article forms a response to Bryan Cheyette’s essay in this journal, “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora,” and focuses on the dialectics of comparing minority experiences in a climate of implicit and explicit violence toward minorities. Agreeing with Cheyette’s invocation of such threatening environments, I speak to what he characterizes as the importance of nonbinary thinking by gesturing to similar work unfolding in Black studies, specifically in the theorization of anti-Blackness and the work of Christina Sharpe. I end with a brief discussion of the Modern Jewish-Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel to focalize the practice of the comparative work between Jewish and postcolonial studies in threatening environments. I argue that Ezekiel’s approach highlights the “fluidity” and in-built multiplicity of such environments, and so undermines the seemingly rigidity of violent and singular binaries.
