The Differences of Identity

by

Shelly Jarrett Bromberg

University of the West Indies -- St. Augustine

Review of:
Borders, Exiles, Diasporas. Edited by Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.

Copyright © 2000 by Shelly Jarrett Bromberg, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. Copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.

1. This collection of seventeen essays, selected from over 200 presentations at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting in 1994, is part of a new series published by Stanford University Press and edited by Elazar Barkan entitled Cultural Sitings. As Barkan explains in the opening page, the purpose of the series is to "rethink" and reevaluate traditional disciplinary boundaries in order to create new theoretical frontiers (v). It is appropriate, then, that the first offering in the series would deal specifically with questions of physical, cultural and experiential boundaries and the various ways in which individuals and communities have proposed to transcend and transform their restrictive environs. In the introduction, Barkan, and coeditor Marie-Denise Shelton, stress that the primary focus upon literary representations of "displacement and cultural dislocation" is due, in large part, to the increasing importance of identity formation for the diasporic subject on a global level (3-5). For the editors, a key feature of this process of self-creation or recreation is the ongoing challenge to traditional limits --be they cultural, national, intellectual or otherwise. Indeed, they celebrate the "improvisation, repetition and bricolage" they see at work in the essays in hopes that such institutional transgressions can help to bring about "alternative readings " of a variety of subjects and experiences (6).
2. The collection is divided roughly into three parts each of which purportedly deals with a specific sub-category of exile, diaspora, or border. Yet, true to the notion of multivariate expressions and perspectives, each section is best understood as a kind of free-floating category that both does and does not contain the essays under each heading. The first and second sections deal primarily with writers of European descent, with the exception of the essays on Reinaldo Arenas and Doris Lessing. The concluding section, "Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters," meanwhile, is primarily centered on writers of the postcolonial diaspora, such as Salman Rushdie, Leila Sebbar, and Michelle Cliff.
3. The tone of such essay collections is often established with the opening essay and Angelika Bammer's "The Dilemma of the But: Writing Germanness After the Holocaust" sets a very high standard indeed. Bammer, an associate professor of German at Emory University, frames her analysis of contemporary German identity formation through a personal account of her family's struggles with the "denial of loss" that many Germans experienced in the aftermath of the Holocaust (18). Bammer is most concerned with the contemporary rise of neo-Nazi nationalisms in Germany, which she considers to be a result of self-hatred. Rather than continue to allow such groups to define "Germanness," Bammer asserts, "we need to own -- not deny -- being German" (19).
4. Personal experience as a basis of analysis is not always successful as in the case of Leslie W. Rabine's essay, "Scraps of Culture: African Style in the African American Community of Los Angeles." Rabine, as a self-confessed "white pseudo-ethnographer" and against the wishes of friends and family concerned for her safety in South Central Los Angeles, goes to interview and photograph the African Marketplace and Cultural "Faire" in Rancho Cienega Park in 1994 (60, 58). While many of Rabine's observations and analyses are interesting, the presence of interjections, such as "no one hijacked my car," although perhaps intended to be humorous, end up sounding more like what Françoise Lionnet, in a later essay, calls "postcolonial paternalism"(202).
5. The majority of the essays, however, adopt a more theoretical model with varying degrees of success. Ricardo L. Ortiz's essay, for example, on the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, is a complex piece that seems to be moving in several directions involving questions of sexuality, nationalism and exile without a definitive focus. Yet, his conclusions about Arenas's suicide in 1990 are highly original and well worth the challenges issued by the theoretical structure.
6. Two of the more successful essays deal with the themes of nationalism and language and identity formation. Taking Teodor Adorno's well-known assertion that poetry would be impossible in the wake of the Holocaust, Erin G. Carlston, in "Defiance and Reconciliation in Paul Celan's Die Niemandsrose, analyzes why this Jewish poet would chose to write in German, the language of the oppressor. Rena N. Potok in "Borders, Exiles, Minor Literature: The Case of the Palestinian-Israeli Writing" investigates a similar aesthetic choice in the work of three contemporary Palestinian authors who write in Hebrew. Potok's essay, one of the most successful blends of theory and textual analyses in the collection, incorporates the themes of borders, exile, and doubling (as an interstitial space) in a seemingly effortless critique. For each of these critics, the conclusions are similar: whether the language is German or Hebrew, for these internally displaced authors, a reappropriation of their national languages is a means of destroying and then creating a new identity forged from the tangled fragments of the past.
7. Overall, this is a particularly valuable collection for readers who are new to the field of cultural studies in general and diasporic writing in particular. Yet, there are also excellent essays for specialists interested in further applications of theoretical analyses from Walter Benjamin to Homi Bhabha. Readers, however, should not restrict their choices only to their primary areas of interest. Rather, this collection offers a unique opportunity to expand horizons through an eclectic blend of theoretical, personal, and artistic expressions.
8. Ultimately, the collection's most successful theme, which extends beyond the boundaries of exile and diaspora, both internal and external, may be the celebration of alterity. In many of the essays the aesthetic and/or theoretical resistance to subsuming difference through either essentialized or universalized categories leads to new and thought-provoking readings of culture, nation and identity.

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