Enlightenment in the colony: The Jewish question and dilemmas in postcolonial modernity

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Enlightenment in the colony: The Jewish question and dilemmas in postcolonial modernity "
A. R. Mufti E. W. Said

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	74961
Doc. No	:	TL33890
Call number	:	‭9910641‬
Main Entry	:	A. R. Mufti
Title & Author	:	Enlightenment in the colony: The Jewish question and dilemmas in postcolonial modernity\ A. R. MuftiE. W. Said
College	:	Columbia University
Date	:	1998
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	1998
Page No	:	286
Abstract	:	This dissertation is concerned with Enlightenment in a colonial and postcolonial setting. Its premise is that minority is a fundamental category of experience in post-Enlightenment liberal societies. It attempts a genealogy of secularism in colonial and postcolonial South Asia by tracing the categories of minority experience to the history of the Jewish Question in European modernity. In Part I, I argue that the Jewish Question represents an irreducible crisis in the development of liberal culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Chapter I concerns the figure of citizen as it emerges in Lessing's Nathan the Wise and Mendelssohn's Jerusalem. Chapter II concerns the ambivalent relationship of Jews to German national belonging in Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation and Heine's The Rabbi of Bacherach. I argue that the abstract citizen as much as the national subject represent moments within the crisis-ridden development of liberalism, and that the Jew appears for both as a crisis and its attempted defusion. In Part II, I argue that Muslim identity in colonial India exceeded the categories of minority experience within which Indian nationalism sought to contain it, an excess that had to be excised through Partition in order for “Muslim” to become “minority.” I turn to Manto in Chapter III, and to Faiz in Chapter IV, in order to argue that they elaborate cultural positions at odds with secularism's minoritization of “the Muslim.” We should view these writers in terms of the ambivalent relationship between Urdu literature—located at the cusp of “minority” and “national” culture—and the discourse of Indian nationhood. Finally, I turn to Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay in order to examine the metaphor of Jewishness-as-minority in postcolonial culture. Desai's achievement is to suggest that we view these two seemingly disparate histories—the crisis of the Jewish Question in Europe and the question of minority in India—through the same prism. Desai inscribes at the level of form the difficulties of such a double vision and insists that “India” can become a unique vantage point for an understanding of the “Jewish” crisis at the heart of European citizenship.
Subject	:	Language, literature and linguistics; Colony; Enlightenment; Germany; Identity; India; Jewish question; Modernity; Muslims; Postcolonial; Literature; Comparative literature; Asian literature; 0305:Asian literature; 0298:Literature; 0295:Comparative litera
Added Entry	:	E. W. Said
Added Entry	:	Columbia University