Distant proximities: Whiteness and worldedness in contemporary Jewish literature

Taub, Naomi S

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117787 Copy

Description

Title

Distant proximities: Whiteness and worldedness in contemporary Jewish literature

Author(s)

Taub, Naomi S

Issue Date

2022-11-28

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

• Rothberg, Michael P
• Kaplan, Brett A

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

• Rothberg, Michael P
• Kaplan, Brett A

Committee Member(s)

• Calderwood, Eric S
• Clingman, Stephen

Department of Study

English

Discipline

English

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Jewish literature
• Jewishness
• whiteness
• race
• settler colonialism
• memory studies
• postcolonial theory
• world literature
• Jewish American literature
• Israeli literature
• Anglo-Jewish literature
• South African literature
• Holocaust memory
• Jewish politics
• liberalism
• liberal internationalism

Abstract

Combining elements of comparative race and ethnicity studies, memory studies, and postcolonial theory with methodological elements of literary formalism and cultural history, my scholarship on contemporary Jewish literature is framed towards critically, politically, and ethically “worlding” our understanding of diverse Jewish identities and their relationship to the global production of whiteness. By bringing together post-1948 texts from the United States, South Africa, Israel, and Britain, Distant Proximities: Whiteness and Worldedness in Contemporary Jewish Literature demonstrates how contemporary Jewish literature de- and re-constructs whiteness through a constellation of multi-layered encounters that transcend national boundaries. In so doing, I aim to shift the discourse around race in Jewish studies in two ways. First, I replace the omnipresent but deeply misleading question, “Are Jews white?” with the more productive, “Under what conditions do Jews understand and/or write themselves as white?” Second, I reconceptualize Jewish whiteness as inherently worlded, shaped by an international network of colonial histories, political commitments, and affective entanglements. In taking this novel approach to Jewish writing in the postwar Anglosphere, my work also reimagines the discourse on whiteness in Global Anglophone literary studies. Over the past few decades, both “whiteness” and the “world” have been the focus of a great deal of scholarly scrutiny, yet the two conceptual frameworks have converged but rarely. My scholarship proposes, among other things, that post-1948 Jewish texts, when read together in certain ways, represent fertile ground for staging this epistemic encounter in the Global Anglophone context. To effect these discursive shifts, my dissertation is organized around the concept of “distant proximity,” which indexes an encounter between objects, characters, or aesthetics in which layers of meaning are created by the proximate activation of histories, identities, and epistemologies usually characterized in terms of distance and difference. To demonstrate this phenomenon, Distant Proximities historicizes and then juxtaposes a series of ostensibly divergent Jewish texts to illuminate their shared discourses on race, centering on two particularly dense and interlocking sites of transmission for whiteness: colonialism and liberalism. Crucially, in this archive, distance modifies, but does not negate, proximity; instead, both Ashkenazi (a term denoting Jews of Western, Northern, and Eastern European descent, from ‘Ashkenaz,’ a medieval term for Germany) and Mizrahi (literally “Eastern” or “Oriental,” a Hebrew term for Jews of the Arab world) Jewish characters are seen defining their ethno-racial identities in relation to multiple proximities, so that an interracial encounter in one country activates layers of meaning and affective-political significations often misrecognized as “belonging” purely to another national context. Essentially, if the ostensible whiteness of a Jew depends on who they are standing next to, it is also always already conditioned by other Jews in other rooms. In the first section, I focus on post/coloniality, a term I use to continually mark the crucially overlapping presence of colonial and postcolonial elements in contemporary Jewish texts. Specifically, I examine how Philip Roth’s The Counterlife (US, 1986), Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants (US, 1971), and Ronit Matalon’s The One Facing Us (Israel, 1995) reveal the post/colonial circulation of imperial geographies and aesthetics, drawing connections between settler colonialism and transhistorical fantasies of whiteness. In the second section, I explore the convergence of international liberalism and liberal internationalism in Dan Jacobson’s The Beginners (South Africa, 1966), Zoë Heller’s The Believers (UK, 2008), and Tony Eprile’s The Persistence of Memory (South Africa, 2004). These texts demonstrate, to begin with, how constructions of whiteness have circulated through global consumer culture in the Anglosphere, as well as the continued racialized resonance of classically liberal narrative forms like the family saga. At the same time, they provide exigent insights into how Holocaust memory, particularly as the assumed foundation of the postwar human rights regime, has conditioned our understanding—and, just as often, our misunderstanding—of transnational white Jewish liberalism over the past seven decades.

Graduation Semester

2022-12

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2022 Naomi Taub

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