Event date: Monday 27 April 2015, 5.30 – 7 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Auditorium A

“Caribbean Literature and Jewish Historical Trauma”; given by Prof. Sarah Phillips Casteel (Carleton University)

Discussions of Black-Jewish literary dynamics have focused almost exclusively on the United States and have tended to be inflected by the persistent political tensions between African Americans and Jewish Americans. Jewish motifs also feature prominently, however, in Caribbean fiction, poetry and drama. Caribbean writers regularly invoke the memory of two traumatic moments of Jewish historical experience: the Sephardic expulsions of the 1490s and the Holocaust. I argue that Caribbean literary treatments of Jewishness cannot be interpreted through the lens of Black-Jewish relations in the U.S. and especially not through a paradigm that Michael Rothberg calls “competitive memory.” Instead, they need to be contextualized with reference to the specific histories of contact and entanglement—both material and symbolic—between Black and Jewish diaspora cultures in the Atlantic world. These histories, which reflect two of the greatest traumas of Jewish experience, extend from the post-expulsion resettlement of early modern Sephardim in the Caribbean to the flight of Jewish refugees from the Nazis to Trinidad and other Caribbean islands in the 1930s. Accordingly, this presentation will identify not only the Holocaust but also 1492 as a node of inter-diasporic comparison with Black historical experience and with the anguish of the Middle Passage in particular. By addressing the transnational circulation of the memory of the Sephardic expulsion as well as of the Holocaust, and by broadening our understanding of Black-Jewish literary relations beyond the U.S. national frame, my discussion helps to advance the emerging conversation between postcolonial studies and Jewish studies.

Sarah Phillips Casteel is Associate Professor of English at Carleton University, where she is  cross-appointed to the Institute of African Studies and where she co-founded the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis. The recipient of a Polanyi Prize from the Government of Ontario and a Horst Frenz Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, she is the author of Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas (U of Virginia P, 2007) and the co-editor with Winfried Siemerling of Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010). Her book Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

All are welcome. Admission is free, and registration is not required. For more information, please contact Stef Craps.