Beyond Diaspora: The Off Home in Jewish Literature from Latin America and Israel

Abstract

“Beyond Diaspora: The Off Home in Jewish Literature from Latin America and Israel” fills a gap in scholarship regarding our understanding of and language to articulate identity construction. It attempts to decenter the structures of belonging, especially in the context of displacement. This historical moment has witnessed increasing global migration stemming from religious or political persecution, poverty, genocide, war, climate change and related environmental catastrophes, among other forces beyond one’s control, not to mention the pursuit of opportunity of one’s own volition. The off home, inspired by Svetlana Boym’s “off-modern,” attempts to articulate the estrangement from and of one’s home and one’s place, personally and collectively. Current scholarship tends to position subjectivity as either completely “at home” in the homeland, or otherwise wholly exilic or diasporic, bearing a deeply-rooted desire to return home. The off home positions home and diaspora (and others forms of displacement) on a more nuanced spectrum. The chapters intentionally chart the off home first in terms of the psychological experience, then the linguistic or interpersonal one, and finally the physical one. The first chapter explores the off home through the depiction of psychological disruption of order. The characters experience “off” modes of thinking, such as amnesia, obsessions, delusions, and even possible schizophrenia, which pose a challenge to the concept of order itself. This resistance to order allows the characters to find release from imposed markers of identity, leading them to reevaluate their sense of belonging in relation to ideas of home and homeland. The second chapter works through the “off” use of language, portraying strategic uses of languages (Ladino and Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Judeo-Arabic), in order to (de)construct paradigms of belonging and identity. The characters resist the hegemony of a dominant language, even while at the same time acknowledging that there is one. The third chapter portrays the off home in its most concrete or physical manifestation, with emphasis on the characters’ interactions with physical structures of home and nationality—houses, passports, visas, diaries, and homelands themselves—that are “off.” The off home proves these physical structures to be the most unstable, and the characters ultimately reject the dependance on physical modes of representation to interpret or recognize their identities that cannot be adequately encapsulated by romanticized categories of subjectivity. This chapter thus also thematizes nonresolution as key to the off home. The coda, rather than “conclude” the dissertation, presents future avenues of exploration and other frameworks in which the off home is a useful and necessary concept. It features Indian anthropologist Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island, which portrays many levels and layers of displacement related to climate change, an understudied but increasingly relevant cause of migration and loss of home.