"Playing Jewish Geography": Diaspora, Home, Nation-State, and Zionism in Contemporary Canadian and American Jewish Fiction

This dissertation explores fiction by American and Canadian Jewish authors that has Israel/Palestine as its setting or subject matter, analyzing them through a lens of diaspora studies in order to demonstrate how diaspora is an ethical alternative to the ethnic nationalism of Zionism. Theoretically, this project deploys thinkers of diaspora (Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, George Steiner, Judith Butler) and world literature (Wai Chee Dimock, Rebecca Walkowitz) with historians and critics of Zionism and Israel/Palestine (Nur Masalha, Ali Abuminah, Steven Salaita, Ella Shohat, Yehouda Shenhav). The dissertation is also interested in how Zionist national time and diasporic time (as theorized by Eyal Chowers and others) compete within and without the projects archive of primary texts. The works of diasporic fiction this project unpacks are written by Theodor Herzl, Leon Uris, Philip Roth, Ayelet Tsabari, and David Bezmozgis. Where the first two chapters interrogate canonical texts by established American (and Austrian) authors, the second two chapters analyze contemporary texts by Canadian authors in the beginning or middle of their careers. Throughout the dissertation, I develop the concept of diasporic heteroglossiaa combining of the work of Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin with the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtinwhich can be defined as fictions unique ability to contain multiple, diasporic voices that resist a national, in this case Zionist, center. What the close, historically and politically informed readings of my primary texts reveal is Jewish diasporic fictions role in establishing the centroperipheral relationship between Israel (the Zionist center) and the diaspora, as well as the concomitant possibility for Jewish diasporic fiction to challenge, trouble, and discard this relationship. I argue that any work of Jewish fiction that concerns itself with Israel/Palestine and Zionism has a number of heightened responsibilities, primarily the making of narrative space for the Palestinian narrative/worldview, the dispossessed other of the Zionist project. Cumulatively, the primary texts underscore the level to which Zionist narratives and myths have infiltrated the Jewish world, and gestures to how we can move beyond the violent fallout of national thinking, towards the ethical alternative of diaspora, where collective life is not predicated on sole ownership of land, xenophobia, militaries, or hegemonic power structures. In the dissertations conclusion, where I briefly look at two novels by Palestinians living in diaspora (Randa Jarrar, Susan Abulhawa), I adhere to the idea that the Zionist settler colonization of Palestine has led to a powerful, if currently violently uneven, bond between the two peoples, one that fiction can, and should, have a role in mending.