In Diasporas of the Mind, Bryan Cheyette seeks to overcome the division among Jewish, Holocaust, and postcolonial studies. Whereas Holocaust studies shunned comparative perspectives, postcolonial studies excluded Jewish history and the Holocaust as part of the Judeo-Christian Western culture. Instead of comparing and equating various historical experiences and diluting them into an ultimately empty model, Cheyette proceeds from Hannah Arendt’s insight that thinking requires locating the similar among the dissimilar. In pursuing this search, Cheyette’s book becomes a vigorous and passionate argument for “a transcultural diasporic imagination” as a way “to move beyond disciplinary thinking.”
Faulting disciplinary thinking from nationalism to identity politics and academic specialization to have created a division, Cheyette traces an illuminating double helix of the aftermath of displacement, trauma, and violence: Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Albert Memmi, Philipp Roth, and Muriel Spark are interwoven with Anita Dessai, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Salman Rushdie, and Edward Said, and Zadie Smith.
The refreshingly and insightful habits of reading outside of established disciplines furnish the book’s texts and represent the culmination of Cheyette’s work on Jews in English literature, literary criticism, modernism, diaspora, and postcolonialism. His numerous publications chronicle his increased distance from traditional disciplines. In Cheyette’s work categories like national literatures become less rigid and correspondences between Jews and victims of colonialism become visible for the first time in such a comprehensive manner.
Diaspora of the Minds is not about historical causation and connectedness or what Arendt called the boomerang effect. To Arendt, German colonial experiences in Africa, for example, become the fertile ground for the flowering of the Nazi elite, an argument that has promoted a colonial turn in Holocaust studies. Cheyette grounds his practice of reading and weaving philosophical and literary texts of Jewish and postcolonial narratives of violence and trauma in history, but he is not attempting to write an overlapping history of racism and colonialism that culminates in a shared history of victims of the Holocaust and colonialism. He references, for example, Aamir Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (2007), which traces how paradigmatic narratives about Jews within Western culture and the language of assimilation, emancipation, separatism, and conversion became globally disseminated.
Rather, Cheyette’s work commences with the realization that in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, various writers grappled with the experience of death camps and decolonization. Hannah Arendt placed Africa at the center of the making of modern racial politics in her The Origins of Totalitarians (1951). Together with her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), her studies contributed toward the emerging discipline of Holocaust and postcolonial studies. On the other side of the Atlantic in Algeria, Frantz Fanon viewed Nazism as a colonial system inside of Europe.
Tracking the imagining of diasporas, national memories become less fixed on particular events, but appear as dynamic and are often transferred to various moments of radicalized violence. Ruth Prawer Jbabvala’s life traverses the Holocaust and postcolonialism. Born in Weimar, Germany, she left Nazi Germany with her family and moved to India in 1951 after she married Cyrus Jhabvala. Her biography has its parallels in the fictional accounting in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), which recalls the history of Jews in Germany and colonialism of India. The novel’s protagonist, Hugo Baumgartner, escapes from Nazi Germany to colonial India, where he follows the unfolding of the Holocaust. His experience of displacement from his former home only intensify when he finds himself an outsider also in both colonial and postcolonial India.
These diasporic routes are both real and imagined. They are informed by understanding diasporas with Paul Gilroy, Rey Chow, and Stuart Hall as invented and imagined. Cheyette, however, distances himself from Hall, who thinks about Jewish diaspora from the perspective of nationalism. Hall’s understanding of Jewish diaspora, Cheyette contends, along with Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, is defined only by absence and displacement. Cheyette cautions against Hall’s universalizing of Jewish history. According to Hall, Jews had formed the classical model for diasporas, which, however, recent diaspora communities transcended. Diasporas of the Mind carefully treads on these myriad intersectional and potential pitfalls to remain mindful of historical specificity and to simply track and analyze ways in which histories and cultures have imagined across national and communal boundaries.
The routes never collapse into essentialized roots, nor do the connections and correspondence that Diasporas of the Mind reveal engage in comparative perspective. What is essential to Cheyette is not an accounting of the Holocaust and colonial genocides, but more so a storytelling of the past that is both imagined and real. Much of the storytelling includes genealogical accounting, when Edward Said famously referred to himself in an interview as the “last Jewish intellectual.” Likewise, Paul Gilroy traced his indebtedness to German Jewish intellectuals and the Kittitian-British novelist, playwright, and essayist, Caryl Phillips, denounced the invisibility of racism and colonial genocide from the perspective of Jewish suffering. In his The European Tribe (1987), he writes that as an adolescent he “channeled a part of my hurt and frustration through the Jewish experience.”
Diasporas of the Mind charts new territory and provides a productive model for undisciplined and highly productive reading that ought be further extended beyond French and English colonialism to Latin America to even more fully understand the cultural imagining and fashioning beyond political and cultural borders. Cheyette’s insightful and artful study is an important contribution toward overcoming what he calls the “Nightmare of History,” a fraud, and the often charged and vexed relation between post-Holocaust and postcolonial writings. In making us realize that there exists a substantial body of literary and philosophical texts that seeks to make these connections in the desire to find meaning, and also to more fully account that we are, in the words of Arendt, still “standing in the midst of a veritable rubble heap,” it prompts us to begin to consider how we might set about the task of making sense not just of where in the heap we stand but also of where others stand in relation to, and with, us.
