Diasporas of the Mind: Literature and Race after the Holocaust

At present most work in Diaspora Studies (the study of the history and culture of migrant peoples and communities) tends to be located in one academic discipline whether it be, for example, Irish Studies, Jewish Studies, African Studies or postcolonial studies. While the work in each area is important, it can fail to address shared experiences. My book, in contrast, compares differing literatures and histories of the diaspora, in order to open up new ways of thinking about this crucial research area.

Although the main emphasis of my book is on literary culture, it will begin by looking historically at some of the most important figures who experienced the ravages of colonialism and the Nazi concentration camps such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Primo Levi and Jean Améry. None of these figures distinguished between the experience of colonialism and fascism and each broadened out the experience of suffering to reveal new insights into the history of racism and anti-Semitism. My aim is to show the ways in which these new insights are taken up by some of the most important post-war novelists.

In particular, I want to explore how the intertwined histories of colonialism and fascism are rewritten in the fiction of Muriel Spark, Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie. All three writers engage with the idea of diaspora, and the multiple histories which result from the experience of diaspora, in differing ways. Muriel Spark-- part English, part Scottish, part Protestant, part Jewish-- exemplifies the diasporic condition which includes some formative years based in Zimbabwe. I will focus on her hitherto neglected African stories as a way of understanding the conflicting religious and racial narratives, with regard to her Gentile Jewishness, in the rest of her fiction.

Philip Roth has increasingly been hailed as the most important contemporary writer in the United States. In a recent New York Times survey of the best work of American fiction published in the past 25 years, Roth was easily the most represented author. One reason for such reverence is that Roth has appropriated the history of European suffering within the borders of the United States in his fiction since the 1990s. This work speaks powerfully to post 9/11 America where traumatic suffering is at the heart of its self-understanding. My argument will be that Roth's late move from being a diasporic writer (based partly in Europe) to a national writer (after returning to the United States) severely curtails the comparative possibilities-- especially in relation to black-Jewish history-- in his earlier fiction.

To a greater extent than Spark and Roth, Rushdie has become an icon of diasporic, cosmopolitan writing in the Anglo-American academy. His celebratory account of living in an 'imaginary homeland' has set the tone for those literary critics who have championed the contemporary postcolonial novel as encapsulating a time of fluid identities and border crossings of all kinds. After the so-called Rushdie Affair, caused by the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie engaged increasingly with Jewish history and culture to construct an alternative kind of diasporic fiction in his novels especially The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) and Shalimar the Clown (2005). The engagement with Jewish and postcolonial history in Spark, Roth and Rushdie enacts, I believe, the new ways of thinking about diaspora first articulated by the historical figures in the earlier chapters of the book.

We are said to live in an Age of Diaspora with nation-states becoming increasingly globalised and cosmopolitan. My last chapter will explore whether a new generation of diasporic writers - Andrea Levy, Caryl Phillips, Zadie Smith, all of whom are postcolonial by birth and engage with Jewish history and culture - have finally transcended the limitations of race and nation and have become 'post-ethnic' writers. No longer can the study of migrant peoples be confined to separate academic disciplines.