The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary - Brossura

Zivin, Erin Graff

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0822343673 ISBN 13: 9780822343677

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2008

Riassunto

While Jews figure in the work of many modern Latin American writers, the questions of how and to what end they are represented have received remarkably little critical attention. Helping to correct this imbalance, Erin Graff Zivin traces the symbolic presence of Jews and Jewishness in late-nineteenth- through late-twentieth-century literary works from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and Nicaragua. Ultimately, Graff Zivin’s investigation of representations of Jewishness reveals a broader, more complex anxiety surrounding difference in modern Latin American culture.

In her readings of Spanish American and Brazilian fiction, Graff Zivin highlights inventions of Jewishness in which the concept is constructed as a rhetorical device. She argues that Jewishness functions as a wandering signifier that while not wholly empty, can be infused with meaning based on the demands of the textual project in question. Just as Jews in Latin America possess distinct histories relative to their European and North American counterparts, they also occupy different symbolic spaces in the cultural landscape. Graff Zivin suggests that in Latin American fiction, anxiety, desire, paranoia, attraction, and repulsion toward Jewishness are always either in tension with or representative of larger attitudes toward otherness, whether racial, sexual, religious, national, economic, or metaphysical. She concludes The Wandering Signifier with an inquiry into whether it is possible to ethically represent the other within the literary text, or whether the act of representation necessarily involves the objectification of the other.

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Recensione:

"The Wandering Signifier is a superb cross-national literary study that touches on questions of diaspora, ethnic relations, and memory. It is accessible to a broad public interested in fields including Latin American studies, cultural studies, and Jewish studies. Erin Graff Zivin moves subtly between the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Jorge Luis Borges, Margo Glantz, and Ricardo Piglia (among many others) to examine the socio-political implications of the many symbolic constructions of Jewishness in Latin American literature. The imaginative scholarship, narrative excellence, and wide-ranging insights make this work required reading for students in multiple fields."--Jeffrey Lesser, author of A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960-1980 and coeditor of Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans "Erin Graff Zivin's book proposes a sophisticated reflection on notions of national belonging, scenes of cultural crisis, and the ethical import of constructing the 'Jew-as-Other' in critical moments of Latin American history. Indeed, this is the first study to address the powerful symbolic presence of Jews in Latin America and the first to consider the ways in which the literary representations of Jewishness enter into productive discussions of citizenship, identity, and ultimately salutary alterity. I am willing to predict that The Wandering Signifier will very soon be considered an indispensable book." --Sylvia Molloy, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, New York University

This study of Jews and Jewishness in literary works from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries analyses their representation within the context of larger attitudes towards otherness. Latin American literary scholars have tended to ignore or miss the presence of Jews in writing from the region, allowing Graff Zivin to highlight the meanings attributed to Jewishness across the works of such canonical writers as Machado de Assis, José de Alencar, Marío de Andrade, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Issues of difference have become central to debates about Latin American culture, making this book a valuable contribution to a corpus of literature about identity in the Americas. The author draws upon concepts of otherness developed by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas that are achieving increasing prominence in Latin American philosophy, not least through the work of Enrique Dussel. --- Gavin O Toole, The Latin American Review of Books, April 2009

L'autore:

Erin Graff Zivin is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the editor ofThe Ethics of Latin American Criticism: Reading Otherwise.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Duke Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0822343673
• ISBN 13: 9780822343677
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 222