The central argument of this book has been that looking beyond the U.S. context of Black-Jewish literary relations reveals a distinctive discourse about Jewishness that carries across a range of postwar Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora texts. The literary works that I have examined, while diverse, have in common several broad features. First, they favor a pluralistic and relational perspective rather than a separatist ethnoracial stance, thereby resisting what Paul Gilroy calls the “dangers of race thinking” (
Between Camps 8). Advancing an inclusive poetics, they largely eschew Afrocentric or ethnocentric models of Caribbean identity. Instead, they tend to privilege the creolized condition of the Caribbean and in some cases present Jewishness as itself emblematic of that condition. The presence of Jewish characters in these texts thus signals what Maryse Condé describes in a 1998 essay as “a widening of horizons” in Caribbean writing: “What we notice through [second- and third-generation Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora] writing is first of all a widening of horizons as the setting of their novels shuttles between different world locations. Secondly, the characters that they portray are as diverse as the settings of their novels. Sometimes they are not even black. In
The Nature of Blood (1996), Caryl Phillips’s main character is a Jew. Thus, under the pen of a Caribbean writer, the Holocaust is equated with the Middle Passage” (“O Brave New World” 5). Engagements with Jewish history mark a new direction in Caribbean literary discourse as it moves to embrace what Glissant calls the “tout-monde” as well as to deepen its investigation of Caribbean creolization. While creolization theory has tended to focus on African, Indigenous, and South and East Asian cultural influences, the writers discussed in this study recognize Jewishness as a significant historical component of Caribbean societies.
Second, this body of writing tends to favor an identificatory and multidirectional mode of comparing diasporic histories rather than a competitive one. Accordingly, it advances a largely sympathetic reading of Jewish history, highlighting two major traumatic moments that link Jewish and Black experience: 1492 and the Holocaust. In part 1 I discussed this identificatory orientation with reference to instances of literary sephardism that may be found in postwar Caribbean fiction and poetry. Part 2 traced this affiliative mode across a series of Caribbean readings of the Holocaust not only as a surrogate for the memory of slavery but also as a historical trauma that brought Blacks and Jews into contact both in the Caribbean and in Europe. Throughout I have argued that Caribbean treatments of Black-Jewish relations are not characterized by the same sense of betrayal and disillusionment that features in their U.S. counterparts. In marked contrast to the decline of Black-Jewish alliance and sympathy in the U.S. from mid-century, in the case of Caribbean literature we see a rising interest in Jewish themes through the latter decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.
The majority of the literary texts discussed in this study were published in the 1980s and 1990s, publication dates that reflect the convergence of a variety of factors and conditions. These two decades saw an increase in public commemorations of the Holocaust as well as the peak of Holocaust fiction as a genre. Although some earlier examples are available, the neoslave narrative also established itself as a significant literary genre in the last quarter of the twentieth century, helping to catalyze broader efforts to memorialize slavery such as the French loi Taubira and the Dutch national slavery monument. Another decisive moment during this same period was the 1992 quincentenary, which gave rise to public discourse about the legacies of both colonialism and the Iberian expulsion while simultaneously failing, as Ella Shohat has argued, to draw connections between these two cataclysms. Equally important for our purposes, it was also the early 1990s that saw Black-Jewish tensions in the United States come to a boiling point with the Crown Heights riots and the Nation of Islam’s publication of
The Secret Relationship of Blacks and Jews. I have argued that the emergence of Caribbean literary narratives about Jewishness in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century can be understood as a response to these literary and social currents on the part of a generation of writers whose consciousnesses were profoundly shaped by World War II. Their identificatory readings of Jewishness and the Holocaust mark their distance from the U.S. discourses of ethnic competition that their texts occasionally ventriloquize. Indeed, for Caryl Phillips, Gilroy, and other Caribbean/diaspora writers and critics, a cross-cultural identification with Jewish experience becomes a means of defining their difference from American Blackness.
Although the reading of Jewish history that emerges in this body of Caribbean literature tends to be sympathetic, it is not monolithic. Rather, a significant ambivalence runs through these texts alongside identification. Neither are the forms of cross-cultural affiliation that Caribbean/diaspora writers articulate based on a naive assumption of similarity or neat correspondence. Instead, the more complex analogical modes that scholars have identified in Phillips’s Holocaust fiction also characterize Caribbean/diaspora writers’ treatments of Jewish themes more broadly. As we saw especially with the examples of Caribbean sephardism examined in the first half of this study, the less polarized reading of Black-Jewish relations that Caribbean literature advances tends to be articulated through prismatic, polyphonic narrative forms. This approach is exemplified by Anna Ruth Henriques’s densely layered illuminated manuscripts, which I discussed in
chapter 1. Rather than adopting binary formulations or making sharp, bifurcated distinctions between Black and Jewish identities, works such as Henriques’s
The Book of Mechtilde favor triadic or labyrinthine structures in which Jewishness serves as a third term that mediates between African and European cultural formations and highlights their relationality.
Relatedly, while some of the Caribbean texts treat Jewishness as an ethical principle that throws the immorality and racial inequity of (post)plantation societies into relief, others challenge an automatic association of Jewishness with victimhood. Destabilizing binary formulations, they present Jews as figures of in-betweenness and moral ambiguity who upset easy oppositions between victim and perpetrator. This quality of in-betweenness is especially highlighted by Caribbean literary sephardism, which exposes the doubleness of colonial Sephardic Jewry as both agents and victims of empire. In some Caribbean Holocaust fiction as well, however, a more complex understanding of the relationship between victimization and collaboration emerges in keeping with a broader shift in recent public discourse from a focus on victimhood to an emphasis on bystanders. Indeed, whether colonial merchants, planters, refugees, or Holocaust survivors, Jewish protagonists in Caribbean literature tend to inhabit an ambiguous gray zone between master and slave, perpetrator and victim. Their ambivalent presence has an unsettling effect that disturbs—and thereby encourages reflection on—master narratives of slavery, empire, and race as well as the generic conventions these narratives support. At the same time, the presence of Jewish protagonists in these texts reflects their metafictional preoccupation with the textual and visual regimes that have governed the construction of racialized Others. In Caribbean literature the introduction of Jewish protagonists contributes to a self-conscious reworking of literary genres and to an understanding of discursive practices as conditioned by colonial hierarchies and structures of power.
Finally, it is important to note that the ambivalences of the Caribbean Jewish histories these texts evoke are echoed by the ambivalent critical reception with which some of the authors considered in this study have met. It is no accident that Jewishness is a persistent trope in the work of writers such as Hearne, Walcott, and Cliff, who have on occasion been accused of inauthenticity, conservatism, and of an insufficiently Afrocentric perspective. Indeed, in a number of the texts that I have discussed, Jewishness appears as a motif in tandem with the authors’ concern with European literary and artistic canons and with Europe’s construction of both its internal and external Others. The presence of Jewish themes in these authors’ writing reflects the exposure to European literary and artistic traditions that their class backgrounds and colonial educations afforded them. In such works Jewishness is an intermediary term, a channel through which to incorporate the European into the African or to consider the ambiguous status of those light-skinned Creole subjects who are both European and not, white and not white. Jewishness, which is itself defined by its racial indefinability, proves especially useful to Caribbean writers who have an interest in exploring mixed-race identities and acknowledging the European components of their ancestry alongside their New World African heritage.