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Introduction: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Willi Goetschel  and
Ato Quayson
Willi Goetschel
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Ato Quayson
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Abstract

The introduction to this special issue makes the case for seeing Jewish studies and postcolonialism as part of a historical constellation that has mutual filiations and genealogies in the two fields. It calls for the imperative to see the world’s problems historically but also through the mutually illuminating perspectives of the two fields.

Keywords

critical constellationJewish studiespostcolonial studiesrefugeesslaverypedagogycolonialism
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 3 , Issue 1: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism , January 2016 , pp. 1 - 9
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 An excellent breakdown of the nature of the Syrian refugee crisis is provided by Professor Hans Rosling in a short but well-structured video. See www.facebook.com/gapminder.org/videos/1014061668628791/?pnref=story; last accessed on September 10, 2015.

2 Zizek, Slavoj, “The Non-Existence of Norway,” London Review of Books Online, September 9, 2015; www.lrb.co.uk/2015/09/09/slavoj-zizek/the-non-existence-of-norwayGoogle Scholar; last accessed October 5, 2015.

3 Marrus, Michael R., The Unwanted: European Refugees from the First World War through the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 10Google Scholar.

4 Cheyette, Bryan, “Frantz Fanon and the Black-Jewish Imaginary,” Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Max Silverman (Manchester University Press 2005), 74Google Scholar.

5 Mendelssohn, Moses, preface to Manasseh Ben Israel’s Vindication of the Jews, in Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, ed. Michah Gottlieb, trans. Curtis Bowman, Elias Sacks, and Allan Arkush (Waltham, MA.: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 39–52Google Scholar, esp. 40.

6 Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Jonathan, and Boyarin, Daniel, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

8 For a good recent discussion of the joint Jewish and postcolonial sources of Derrida and Cixous work, see Kaiser, Birgit “Algerian Disorders: On Deconstructive Postcolonialism in Cixous and Derrida,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2.2 (2014): 191–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For recent work concerning the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory relation to Jewish thought see the two theme issues of Bamidbar: Journal for Jewish Thought and Philosophy 1 (2013) and 2 (2014).

9 Moses Mendelssohn, ibid.

10 See Goetschel, Willi, “State, Sovereignty, and the Outside Within: Mendelssohn’s View from the ‘Jewish Colony,’ ” The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 178–188Google Scholar.

11 Galchinsky, Michael, “Africans, Indians, Arabs, and Scots: Jewish and Other Question in the Age of Empire,” Jewish Culture and History 6.1 (2009): 57Google Scholar. Our insights here draw predominantly on Michael Galchinksy’s illuminating discussion of the intersectional character of the Jewish Question in the nineteenth century.

12 Ibid. 47.

13 For the term shadow discourse see Suchoff, David, Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 17Google Scholar.

14 Mufti, Aamir, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 For more on world migrations and the impact these have had on postcolonial studies, see Quayson, Ato, “Introduction: Postcolonial Studies in a Changing Historical Frame,” in The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Ato Quayson, Vol. 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3–29Google Scholar, and “Africa and its Diverse Diasporas,” The Oxford Handbook to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 628–47.

16 Casteel, Sarah Philips, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.