Performative Selves: The Americanization of Post-Soviet Jewish Women Writers
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and ensuing waves of emigration, Jewish communities in several parts of the world have witnessed significant transformations. In this context, literary and cultural studies is witnessing the emergence of a generation of post-Soviet Jewish fiction writers in the United States: Born in the 1970s in today’s Russia or Ukraine, these are English-writing authors like Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, Sana Krasikov, Lara Vapnyar, and others, whose coming-of-age narratives trace their socialization in both “Eastern” and “Western” cultures.
By taking a transnational and interdisciplinary approach, the dissertation project attempts a systematic analysis of post-Soviet Jewish American fiction. The basic argument is that this new current of neorealist and often ironic literature has its discursive share in the complex formation process of post-Soviet Jewish American ethnic identity. “[We] have to think of what kind of image [we] want to project. Everyone already thinks we’re bandits and whores. We’ve got to rebrand ourselves.” This meta-fictional claim, voiced by one of Gary Shteyngart’s Russified protagonists, will be read as a performative gesture that points to a carefully designed and affirmative politics of self-representation on the part of the writers under discussion. Placing the texts within a transnational ethno-cultural context, and in relation to several intersecting identity categories (race, nationality, gender), the project analyzes how post-Soviet Jewish American novelists aesthetically subvert, negotiate, and re-affirm the discourses into which they write themselves.
Research Field: American Studies
Supervisors: Maria Diedrich, Alfred Sproede, Paul Spickard (UCSB)