Jew, Woman, Other: Iterations of the Other in Modern British Writing

• Thesis title in Czech: Žid, žena, jiné: Iterace jinakosti v moderní britské literatuře
• Thesis title in English: Jew, Woman, Other: Iterations of the Other in Modern British Writing
• Key words: postkolonialismus|feminismus|britská literatura|britská židovská literatura|jinakost
• English key words: postcolonialism|feminism|British literature|British-Jewish literature|the Other
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2023/2024
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: PhDr. Soňa Nováková, CSc.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 02.01.2024
• Date of assignment: 04.01.2024
• Administrator's approval: approved
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 04.01.2024
• Submitted/finalized: no

Guidelines

The simultaneously disquieting and exciting notion of the alien other is nothing novel within English (and subsequently British) culture. Studying the looming giant of Western writing, American critic Leslie Fiedler identifies four basic versions of the stranger in his The Stranger in Shakespeare. Those are the Moor, the New World savage, the woman, and the Jew. The Moor and the New World savage can be merged into a stranger living afar, in an "exotic" place entirely outside the English context, and could presumably be encountered when an adventurer ventures outside the comforting, safe space of civilization. In reality, these strangers also existed in hybrid spaces where England was encountering the wider world - the metropolis of London and the busy ports such as Plymouth and Bristol. The woman exists next to the Englishman but is both overlooked and seemingly elusive. The Jew fluidly moves between those two poles, at times living among the majority population yet divided from it by incomprehension and Christian prejudice, at times banished altogether and only imagined. In the case of England, all Jews were banished from the country by Edward I in the 13th century and only returned in the mid-17th century when Oliver Cromwell invited them back.

In the Other, the strangeness was always belied by a disquieting sense of familiarity. He or she presented a distorted mirror image to the white male gaze. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin neatly sum up the issue in their study of post-colonial literatures The Empire Writes Back: "The Other can, of course, only be constructed out of the archive of 'the self" yet the self must also articulate the Other as inescapably different." The strategies for classifying and describing this crucial difference varied according to the context of the encounter with the other and the pre-conceived notions about certain kinds of strangers. Leslie Fiedler writes that describing the others in a moment of clash depends "on whether the defining group conquers or is conquered by them." Consequently, they are defined "as superhuman or subhuman, divine or diabolic; and the confrontation with them is rendered in appropriate terms, honorific or pejorative."

Bringing British Jewish writers and women writers into the conversation about otherness helps us understand the different ways of constructing the Other within the dominant cultural discourse, contrast strategies of speaking back to and about the majority culture, and reveal an implicit hierarchy of otherness. Drawing the Jewish writers into the post-colonial theoretical framework creates a designated space wherein the similarities, and perhaps more importantly, distinctive qualities, can be observed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld describes modern Jewish writing as "rich, varied, complex, and endlessly interesting but in conceptual terms [...] also notoriously elusive and resistant to precise definition." The hope is to point towards new ways of thinking about Jewish writing and its specificity.

This dissertation will argue that post-colonial writing is a useful framework for discussing British Jewish writers. Concepts such as identity, place, alienation, displacement, and diaspora lend themselves easily to discussing Jewish writing. Moreover, juxtaposing Jewish writers with those who have roots in former colonies opens new ways of reading both the writers who are typically classified as post-colonial and British Jewish writers.

The first chapter will demonstrate the traditional understanding of post-colonial writing and introduce this theoretical framework, using the genre's classic, Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, as a representative example. The second chapter will bring in the female perspective and the issue of intersectionality, using Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other and The Emperor's Babe. The third chapter will reach out to British Jewish writing and will use the previous chapters to discuss how it fits into the post-colonial theoretical framework and in what ways it is distinctive.

References

Primary Literature
Alderman, Naomi. Disobedience. Penguin Books, 2006.
Evaristo, Bernardine. Girl, Woman, Other. Penguin Books, 2020.
Evaristo, Bernardine. Manifesto: On Never Giving Up. Hamish Hamilton: 2021.
Evaristo, Bernardine. The Emperor’s Babe. Penguin Books, 2020.
Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin Books, 2006.
Secondary Literature
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 2002.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Brauner, David. Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Cheyette, Bryan. Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History.
Chew, Shirley, and Richards, David, eds. A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature. Chichester: Blackwell Publishing, 2010.
Darwin, John. Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness.” Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 1967.
Fiedler, Leslie A. The Stranger in Shakespeare. London: Croom Helm London, 1973.
Lewis, Reina, and Sara Mills, eds. Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Routledge, 2003.
Liska, Vivian, and Rosenfeld, Alvin H. eds. Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, 1995.
McConnell, Justine. “CROSSING BORDERS: Bernardine Evaristo’s ‘The Emperor’s Babe.’” Callaloo, Vol. 39, No. 1, Papers on Africa and Its Diaspora from a TORCH Workshop, Oxford University, UK (Winter, 2016): 103-114.
Nasta, Susheila. “Introduction.” in Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin Books, 2006. v-xvii.
Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Rajapandi M., A. Hariharasudan, K. Gurusamy, and D. Pandeeswari. “The Analytical Reading Discourse of Liberal Feminism in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other through Black Women in Different Generations.” World Journal of English Language Vol. 12, No. 2; 2022, Special Issue: 47-54.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1995.
Sarıkaya-Şen, Merve. “Reconfiguring Feminism: Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other” The European Legacy, 26:3-4 (2021): 303-315.
Staehler, Axel, ed. Anglophone Jewish Literature. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.
Sicher, Efraim. “Jewish ‘Bad Girls’: Transgressive Narratives and Rebellious Daughters in Contemporary British Jewish Women’s Writing.” Melilah Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies 13 (2019): 120.