The Weather

To read Bryan Cheyette’s essay is to have the impression that “postcolonial studies” has two indubitable characteristics: polemical anti-Zionism and a “regressive” demand for political action.Footnote ¹⁰ There are, of course, several problems with such assumptions. For one, “postcolonial studies” is a remarkably broad field of study, variously applied to the criticism emerging out of practically every country in the world.Footnote ¹¹ We might, however, along with Ato Quayson, agree on a “somewhat narrower deployment of the term” to refer to literature that “gains tremendous acceleration in the long 1980s when writers from the erstwhile cultural margins begin to regularly be awarded Nobel and other prestigious literary prizes.”Footnote ¹² Cheyette seemingly shares this narrower definition later when he characterizes something he calls an “institutionalized [postcolonial studies] in the 1980s and 90s” which, implied in the unflattering use of the word institutionalized, does not possess the “moral imagination” of “imaginative postcolonial writers” like Salman Rushdie, who were also publishing at this time.Footnote ¹³ Here, as with every instance of the term in the essay, “postcolonial studies” is subtly coded as undesirable, restrictive, and unimaginative.

The only evidence Cheyette provides for such an unflattering characterization is to quote another generalized claim from the editors of Colonialism and the Jews who write that “Jews and colonialism frequently became reduced to polemics over Zionism, flattening the issue rather than taking account of its nuances.”Footnote ¹⁴ Given that explicit comparative project of placing Jewish studies in conversation with postcolonial studies is relatively new, it remains unclear who is “flattening the issue.”Footnote ¹⁵ Yet the threat feels real for Cheyette and compels him to ask a standalone question following this quote—a perceived accusation that haunts the essay: “What use is nuance when urgent political action is needed?”Footnote ¹⁶

The person who has arguably done the most, recently, to further this comparative project, Aamir Mufti in his book Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (2007) becomes the stand-in figure of this regressive, anti-Zionist, and politically obsessed “postcolonial studies.”Footnote ¹⁷ Quoting from Mufti’s interview with Ato Quayson in this journal, Cheyette fixates on a single sentence of Mufti’s description of his next book project. Mufti wishes “to explore the horrific dialectical reversal [in the case of Israel] that can turn victims into perpetrators, or—I know this is explosive and painful for both peoples I am naming here—‘Jews’ into ‘Germans.’ ”Footnote ¹⁸ Cheyette is quick to note that his “point is not that Mufti is reductively calling for unthinking activism . . . but the slippage into crudest forms of analogical thinking at this point in the interview is illustrative of precisely what is lost when critical thinking is replaced by actionism.”Footnote ¹⁹ Without expanding on it here, I will simply agree with Cheyette that Mufti’s work needs no defense against the charge of uncritical logic or indeed the charge of demanding unthinking activism.Footnote ²⁰ Given that this one example from Mufti overshadows and colors the entire essay, however, we should note that “postcolonial studies” and Mufti are simply employed as bogey men—a ruse by which Cheyette can launch a broader critique of supersessionist thinking in the “academy.”

Indeed, Cheyette is at his strongest when unpacking the “most important of the binaries”—supersessionism.Footnote ²¹ He is right to point out the “recent appropriation of so-called postmodern or theo-political Pauline theology by Agamben, Badiou and Zizek,” as well as the troubling implications of their theorization of “eventicity,” whereby, in the historical example, Jews are precisely what “Paul’s conversion event” seeks to replace and cast aside as “old.”Footnote ²² Here, rather than originating from the bogey man of “postcolonial studies,” we have the first markings of what we might call, following Christina Sharpe, a “weather” of supersessionism.Footnote ²³ Coupled with the recent global rise of the far right, and the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, anti-Semitism, majoritarianism, and White supremacy are also more explicitly back in the public discourse with ever-present threats and acts of violence toward minorities. To point out, here, Donald Trump’s easy relationship with Israel’s far-right prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is to, once again, seemingly force “the folks in Jewish studies” into a political and un-nuanced denouncement of the state of Israel. To unpack this relationship between, at first glance, uncanny bedfellows in Trump and Netanyahu, we might well look forward to Mufti’s project that critiques “the militarized Spartan state . . . [which] can exist precisely by refusing to compromise with its actual human and social environment.”Footnote ²⁴ What we can say for sure, however, is that the pressure that energizes Cheyette’s critique of binary thinking—supersessionism, disciplinary thinking, and foundational thinking—whatever its supposed origination, is indeed a force to be reckoned with in a climate of avowedly threatening and anti-minoritanism rhetoric.

Yet to characterize all political action in this climate as that which “evokes taking a swing” is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration on Cheyette’s part.Footnote ²⁵ Following “Adorno’s critique of modern culture, one of the most thoroughgoing and pessimistic that we possess” leaves Cheyette, much like Fredric Jameson’s assessment of Adorno’s negative dialectics, with giving “an exaggerated and distorted importance to the moment of failure which is present in all modern thinking: and it is this overemphasis, more than anything else, which seems to account for the lack of political commitment.”Footnote ²⁶ Consequently, even when Cheyette attempts to “overcome this binary impasse”—the “this” referring to his enumerated preponderance of binary thinking in a number of distinct fields of study—through a recuperation of “interdisciplinary concepts which travel” like “ghetto” and “diaspora,” he cannot help but “fail” or at least appear compromised.Footnote ²⁷ With both terms, he remains stymied by the historical Jewish diaspora and ghetto as the “origin”/“classic instantiation” of both concepts, making his proposal “prey to supersessionist and foundational thinking.”Footnote ²⁸ Continually qualifying, therefore, that the use of his “traveling concepts” is not intended to “separate the history of the ghetto or diaspora into old or new,” but to place these “histories in dialogue,” one could argue, quite reasonably, that these concepts also display the very real possibility of “slippage into analogical thinking,” leading us back to Cheyette’s argument with Mufti.Footnote ²⁹ But here is where I believe the vital importance of Cheyette’s work lies: it is a profoundly serious example of the pressures and seemingly inevitable failure awaiting “ ‘good Jews,’ on the side of angels,” who are attempting to take a critical approach to the contemporary and unfolding connections between Jewish and postcolonial studies.Footnote ³⁰ This pressure forces Cheyette into only one real possibility—the negatively imaged space where “critical thought” can insist on “nuance,” and “overcome[ing] this binary impasse” “unexceptional dialogue” can take place.

Threatening Environments

Imagining differently for a moment what Cheyette’s Adornian response to a “weather” of supersessionism and right-wing political ideology might look like, I would like to highlight another critical intervention to similarly characterized, threateningly binary environments—Christina Sharpe’s recent book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016).Footnote ³¹ For Sharpe, Cheyette’s question, “Does the academy, in the twenty-first century, still have the authority to speak on such urgent political issues [which] . . . takes place outside the academy?,” is irrelevant insomuch that as a Black scholar, the “weather” of antiBlackness is still ever present, “the academy” providing no protection—“In what I’m calling the weather, anti-Blackness is pervasive as climate . . . it is the atmospheric condition of time and place.”Footnote ³² In this weather of anti-Blackness, where “Blackness become[s] the symbol, par excellence, for the less-than-human being condemned to death” and “Black deaths are produced as normative” in a wide range of public, private, creative, and political discourses, the threat to Black bodies is ongoing, omnipresent, and does not stop to verify a university affiliated identification card.Footnote ³³ So when Sharpe directly and repeatedly writes about her experience with Black death in her family, quoting Patricia Saunders, the “autobiographical example . . . [is] not about naval gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them.”Footnote ³⁴ Furthermore, unable to breathe, literally and metaphorically, and “living in the afterlives of slavery, sitting in the room with history, in a lived and undeclared state of emergency,” Sharpe’s book forms an investigation into the need for “at the very least, if we are lucky, an opportunity . . . in our Black bodies to try to look, to see.”Footnote ³⁵ It is easy, therefore, to see how Sharpe and Cheyette share a project of making legible the nuances of lived, minority existence, both in the academy and without.

Early on in the book, Sharpe draws particular attention to interactions and difficulties between approaches to making legible the horrors of the Holocaust and North American slavery in one of her classes, titled “Memory for Forgetting.”Footnote ³⁶ She writes, “When I taught the course chronologically, I found that many, certainly well-meaning students, held onto whatever empathy they might have for reading about the Holocaust but not for North American slavery.”Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, in Sharpe’s experience US students are often unable “to think slavery as state violence” in a manner similar to their ready understanding of the Holocaust.Footnote ³⁸ Consequently, Sharpe, changing her method and now “teaching the Holocaust first and then North American chattel slavery,” is able, through analogy, to demonstrate how unlike the Holocaust, the “means and modes of Black subjection may have changed, but the fact and structure of that subjection remain.”Footnote ³⁹ In such moments of comparative study we glimpse less sinister and empathetic uses of what Cheyette critiques as foundational and supersessionist thinking. As Willi Goetschel and Ato Quayson, invoking David Suchoff, note, Jewish experience has often served as “a form of shadow discourse to substitute for confronting the challenges [of] various national agendas” and, for better and for worse, is never far for public consciousness.Footnote ⁴⁰ Jewish experience, and Jewish suffering specifically, has therefore, come to be a powerful lens—a “liberating shadow discourse”—through which a number of minority groups have sought to refract their own experiences with the hope of being made legible to a wider audience.Footnote ⁴¹ Cheyette remarks on this “anxiety of appropriation,” both in his essay during his discussion of Rushdie’s use of Jewish characters and in his book Diasporas of the Mind, but is always at pains to highlight how the act of employing Jewish experience, despite its benefits, always culminates in an attempt to “transcend” Jewish history and consign it to be “in the past.”Footnote ⁴² This ever-present threat is indeed also Sharpe’s double bind of living in a climate of anti-Blackness—the Black (Jewish) body is the most legible precisely at the moment at which it is to be annihilated, superseded, murdered.

Consequently, Sharpe, like Cheyette, also resists the “moralization of politics” and is hyper-ware of the very real dangers of being an “exceptional” body/peoples/historical example. So when Sharpe asks what it might be for Mikia Hutchings, a twelve-year-old Black girl, to be made legible in a the New York Times article about her disciplinary hearing regarding a school suspension, her argument “for Mikia to come into sight should not be mistaken as an argument for representation or representational politics.”Footnote ⁴³ Through what Sharpe calls “Black annotation and Black redaction,” where Mikia’s direct quotes, all of two sentences, are highlighted by “Blacking out” the text around her words, Mikia can only emerge through such “negative space.” Indeed, much like Adorno’s writing, Sharpe’s genre- and form-bending work of criticism proceeds through a continual use of parataxis. Coupled with italicized definitions and quotes that interrupt, expand, rupture, broaden, and awaken the writing, her work demonstrates the difficulty, and necessity, of a space for Black life to emerge in a climate of “Black death.” Writing of the death of Michael Brown, Sharpe writes, “The constant production of Black death is and as necessary returns us to the singularity. But just as the weather is always ripe for Black death, the singularity also produces Black resistances and refusals.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Part of that resistance is the refusal to participate in a political reality that is premised on and continually produces Black people as “no-citizen.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The Hidden Openness of Tradition

In the last section of this essay, I would like to turn briefly to the Jewish-Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel as a way to focalize the practice of comparative work in a threatening environment—an approach that highlights the “fluidity” and multiplicity of such environments and so undermines the seeming rigidity of violent and singular binaries.Footnote ⁴⁶ The first Indian poet to publish in English after India gained its independence in 1947, Ezekiel (first published in 1952) was the pioneer of Modern Indian poetry written in English. Some of his most controversial poems were part of the series titled “Very Indian Poems in English,” where he attempted to mimic the patterns of Indian English—a deviation from his more customary iamb-inflected free verse—and for which he was widely judged to be mocking Indian English.Footnote ⁴⁷ As the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra tactfully notes, “I think he wrote far too many ‘Very Indian Poems in English.’”Footnote ⁴⁸ In his own defense Ezekiel said, “In some poems, ‘Indian English’ poems, I’m not sneering, I am using the language actually used in [Bombay] city. In the case of [one such poem], I even showed the poem to the person concerned. He felt that it is the English we speak and hear around us.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Despite Ezekiel’s claim of linguistic faithfulness, his poems are indeed quite humorous because they highlight the often funny linguistic idiosyncrasies of Indian English, which draws on structures of meaning-making from a wide range of Indian languages. This capacity for humor, arguably vital in our own comparative work, is an important part of what David Suchoff, in his analysis of a “Kafka’s Jewish linguistic sources,” calls “the hidden openness of tradition”—the notion that seemingly singular national-linguistic identities (in Ezekiel’s case, Hindu nationalism) draws from a multiplicity of linguistic and cultural sources.Footnote ⁵⁰

In “The Patriot,” Ezekiel gives us a speaker who, similarly, humorously draws from such varied sources as Mahatma Gandhi, Shakespeare, “Ancient Indian Wisdom,” and the Indian daily The Times of India. Footnote ⁵¹ Notice, however, that central aspects of the poem also revolve around highly charged contemporary political events:

Unlike what we have seen in Cheyette’s and Sharpe’s analyses of threatening singularities, Ezekiel’s depiction of an “Indian patriot” is suffused with a seemingly contradictory profusion of both “foreign” and Indian cultural and linguistic references. Yet the speaker is unperturbed by the contradictions, including that of espousing “tolerance” and claiming that all “men are bothers” while calmly pronouncing that “Ram Rajya”—the kingdom of the Hindu god Ram and rallying cry for the far-right Hindutva movement, which demands an “India for Hindus”—“is surely coming.” Holding a mirror, as it were, to the world, Ezekiel deftly embeds the threat of fundamentalism into a largely “funny” poem, thus exposing the often hidden dialectical tension between a substratum of plurality that animates threatening singularities.

Indeed, Ezekiel’s poems often willfully carve out space for multiplicity. “Latter-Day Psalms,” for example, rewrites nine Psalms and undoes their desire for clear distinctions, say, between “the blessed” and “the scorned” in Psalm 1:

Here we see that Ezekiel’s desire to “listen patiently” and think dialectically, rather than through the binary logic of exclusion, directly relates to his “delight in action.” As a poet, this leads him later in the poem sequence to argue that “It is the story-teller who/ keeps saying that we did not/ keep God’s testimony. He ne-/ ver learns that it cannot be kept” and “Perhaps the story-teller/ is to the blame; perhaps it is/ neither God’s fault nor/ that of his chosen people.”Footnote ⁵⁴ I would like to end this essay with the suggestion that perhaps it is also our task, as storytellers in inclement weather, to follow Cheyette, Sharpe, and Ezekiel, and open up, rupture, and challenge narratives of singularity, but to do so politically, with humor, and with “a pleasurable form of heresy [that] keeps a straight face.”Footnote ⁵⁵