Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry最新文献

{"title":"Stumbling Upon the Archive","authors":"Jonathan Boyarin","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.32","url":null,"abstract":"My title is inspired by the image of the Stolpersteine, protruding bricks set into the sidewalks of German cities and commemorating Jewswho had lived in those places prior to the Great Destruction, which are intended to interrupt not only a smooth passage through space but also through time. Even those of us whose professional efforts are devoted to documenting and analyzing such interruptions are inevitably, beyondworking hours, caught up just like others of our class in the ongoing time-flow of progress (we have no desire to see our retirement accounts forming “constellations” with the Great Recession). Hence evidence from beyond the occasionally claustrophobic discourse of critical theory that time really is not only continuous and progressive comes as a bracing reminder. I am a scholar of modern Jewish studies, with a deep commitment to understanding both the dynamics of Jewish diasporic existence transnationally and transhistorically, and especially the relationship between the politics of Jewish difference inside Europe on one hand and “the colonial encounter” on the other. I therefore read Geraldine Heng’s chapter 2, titled “A Case Study of the Racial State: Jews as Internal Minority in England,” as an important intervention in a broader conversation about the relations among Christianity, Jewishness, and the rhetorics and techniques of the modern nation-state.1 Making that intervention as one of a set of case studies of racialization also sets the question of Jewish difference in premodern Europe squarely within another broad conversation about the links between racialization (in the broad definition that Heng proposes) within and beyond Europe’s boundaries.2 Moreover, whatever the critical consensus about the merits of that broad definition may turn out to be, it","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49254308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Historiographies of Premodern Critical Race Studies and Jewish Studies","authors":"Dorothy Kim","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.40","url":null,"abstract":"In recent discussions of Geraldine Heng’s foundational book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, one chapter has received much critical attention: chapter 2, “State/Nation: A Case Study of the Racial State: Jews as Internal Minority in England.” This chapter and her separate book, England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West, delineate how England, over 400 years, created the blueprint for an almost complete racialized state and continued to use Jewish racialization after Jewish expulsion in 1290.1 She uses medieval England’s situation as a “case study of medieval race that concentrates on one country ...” and in so doing tracks how structural racism is attached to medieval English Jews. Heng explains her method and approach— microhistory and case study—as well as how this methodology reinforces her main argument about race in themedieval European past in The Invention of Race:","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44403404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comments on “The New Jewish Question”","authors":"F. Devji","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.26","url":null,"abstract":"If the “old” Jewish Question had asked how a Jew could be a citizen, the “new” one posed by Daniel Boyarin’s remarkable and courageous article asks how nationality can exist without a state. Striking about this formulation is the distance it marks from the European debates about emancipation and assimilation that had defined its predecessor. Boyarin’s context is not continental but imperial, taking into account Jews in colonized lands as much as the historical relationship between Europe and empire. As Hannah Arendt was the first to argue in The Origins of Totalitarianism, this relationship possessed an outward trajectory that went through anti-Semitism and an inward return by way of genocide.1","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42590075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Solidarity and the Medieval Invention of Race","authors":"S. Chaganti","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.37","url":null,"abstract":"As I wrote this piece, University of Leicester administrators proposed to excise Chaucer and other medieval authors from the English Department’s curriculum, choosing instead “modules” pertaining to “race, ethnicity, sexuality, and diversity” to achieve a “decolonised curriculum.”1 Responses ranged from advocacy of inclusive access to Chaucer to interrogation of the neoliberal agenda underlying the cuts to debate over medieval studies’ ability to incorporate those other modules.2 The Leicester Students’ Union noted the “co-opting” of “decolonisation rhetoric.”3 This last point raises two related questions. First, what did scholars in modern and contemporary fields engaging in liberatory work on decoloniality and self-determination think about this iteration of the administrative weaponization of left-leaning language given the many ways that ethnic and gender studies have historically dealt with administrators’ similar co-optive demobilizations? Second, how are we creating solidarity beyond medieval studies with these and other fields? A medievalist response to administrative threat could be to fight for a radical curriculum across many fields; to take action against the zero-sum, divide-and-conquer terms that administrations set; to amplify labor union actions, such as strikes and boycotts; to insist that no one, including but not limited to medievalists, be fired.4 Medievalists have always","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42483822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Invention of Race and the Postcolonial Renaissance","authors":"A. Dhar","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.38","url":null,"abstract":"An academic generation before mine, early modern studies, although primarily based in the global north, became the beneficiary of ground-making work along two key intellectual strands emerging from wider connections. First, there was the rich scholarship in premodern critical race studies, with Kim Hall, Ian Smith, Margo Hendricks, and Ayanna Thompson, among others, using the towering intellectual energies of US-based but transatlantic-movement-informed intersectional Black studies. Second, therewas the influence of globe-spanning, globequestioning, postcolonial studies—with Eldred Jones, Imtiaz Habib, Ania Loomba, Jyotsna Singh, and Poonam Trivedi, among others, variously using the works of such intellects as Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. It is impossible to overstate how deeply this energization of early modern studies as a field has contributed to its continued presence and appeal, even urgency, in the twenty-first century. Without these late-twentieth-century foundations in critical race and postcolonial studies, early modern studies today would have been a far more provincial field than it is, and even more invested in white supremacist fantasies of insular excellence. And arguably, none of the new and generative directions of study, such as of eco-critical early modernisms, transnational early modernisms, borderland and migration studies, global performance studies, food studies, critical book history, Chicanx studies, Dalit Shakespeares, Indigenous studies, and critical disability studies would have found a substrate here on which to grow and build. (See, for instance, new and emerging work by scholars such as Ashley Sarpong, Lubaaba Al-Azami, Noémie Ndiaye, Ruben Espinosa, Alexa Alice Joubin, Amrita Sen, Jennifer Park, Brandi K. Adams, Laura Lehua Yim, Vijetha Kumar, Justin Shaw, and others operating in these emerging streams of study.) However, one of the challenges of scholarly work along the UK-US-axis—and this axis remains the most powerful in my field—is the resistance to widespread discussions of the interlocked legacies of colonialism and capitalism that still shape our world. The United Kingdom, with its deep colonial bequest, is so eager","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42785150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Race in the Islamicate Middle East: Reflections after Heng","authors":"Justin Stearns","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.36","url":null,"abstract":"When we go looking for the present in the past we always find it, a reflection of our own desire that speaks to the time and place we began our search. This problem is well known to historians of premodern science, the term itself in its singular representing a stumbling block to understanding how scholars, practitioners, and their societies classified and pursued knowledge of the natural world. In order to avoid the teleology of shearing all knowledge and practice from whatever does not lead to the science of the twentieth century, such historians turn science into natural philosophy or employ it in the plural, sciences, as discrete bodies of knowledge lacking a unifying method, some mathematical, some drawing on empirical observation, some rooted in the occult.2 This attention to terminology plays a small if initial role in how these historians hope to describe past attempts to understand and intervene in the natural world. Without such attention to the words we use, they argue, we risk misreading the past out of a desire to find there our present moment and our present understandings. To be sure, there are continuities across time, but these must be held in balance with the contingencies of past contexts. With race, we face a similar challenge with another term that gained its current significance in the nineteenth century, but which can plausibly be translated from concepts found in languages around the Mediterranean from antiquity until the present","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44218995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"As If You Were There","authors":"Haun Saussy","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.31","url":null,"abstract":"What is involved in framing a counterfactual? Let’s say I have a daydream about living in Shakespeare’s time. Who would I be and what would I do? Well, I’d go to the Globe, that much I know for sure, and bring a notebook. Of course, it is impossible for me to have lived in Shakespeare’s time, for the “me” that is having this revery is the result of genealogies, circumstances, and relationships that cannot be displaced from the second half of the twentieth century without tearing apart the structure of all world history. To have this imagination, I must first assume that there is a “me” that can be transported into times and places whose definition excludes that “me.” Perhaps the concept of an essential self or soul derives from the wish to pursue such scenarios beyond the point at which they crash into inescapable contradictions.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43226852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On a Double Decker Omnibus to Golders Green","authors":"Bryan Cheyette","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.43","url":null,"abstract":"My abiding memory of Daniel Boyarin is sitting with him on the top deck of one of London’s famous red buses. We were traveling to Golders Green to eat a kosher meal after a conference in central London. It was the summer of 1994, at the height of Western optimism that the Oslo Accords would bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end. This optimism, however naive, resulted in an extraordinary phenomenon. Closeted Jews in the British academy attended the conference by the hundreds. The late Laura Marcus and I, who organized “Modernity, Culture, and ‘the Jew,’” were expecting a handful of specialists along with the invited speakers, such as Daniel Boyarin. Instead, the audience was made up of a rainbow alliance of out-Jews and other others who could no longer fit on a single red bus but needed a fleet of double-deckers. This was a time when a new iteration of Jewish studies—feminist, fluidly gendered, postcolonial, antiracist, anti-Eurocentric—came into being and has, thankfully, influenced future generations of scholars.2 No less important, it was a time of a momentary and unspoken hope that the world could be healed and that tikkun olam (the “repair of the world”) might at long last be on the horizon.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46660105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jarad Zimbler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge University Press, 2020, 274 pp.","authors":"Laila Zaitoun","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.42","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42324042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nation and Sovereignty: A Response to Boyarin","authors":"Partha Chatterjee","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.28","url":null,"abstract":"In his provocative article “The New Jewish Question,” Daniel Boyarin has offered a view of the Jewish nation as a collective identity that is not only diasporic but also “counter-sovereign.” I found his reappraisal of the history of Zionism very informative. Unfortunately, I do not have the competence to engage with it. But I do have a few things to say about his more general claim regarding the possibility of nationalism being dissociated from sovereignty.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48458549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}