Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Book part
- Introduction
- Part I New World Encounters
- Part II Genres: Adopting, Adapting, Reinventing
- Part III Place and Peoplehood: Redefining “Here” and “There”
- Beyond America
- American Sites
- 18 Their New York: Possessing the “Capital of Words”
- 19 Spaces ofYidishkayt: New York in American Yiddish Prose
- 20 Landscapes: America and the Americas
- 21 Across the Border: Canadian Jewish Writing
- Part IV Creating Fields
- Part V New Perspectives
- Bibliography
- Index
20 - Landscapes: America and the Americas
from American Sites
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2015
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Book part
- Introduction
- Part I New World Encounters
- Part II Genres: Adopting, Adapting, Reinventing
- Part III Place and Peoplehood: Redefining “Here” and “There”
- Beyond America
- American Sites
- 18 Their New York: Possessing the “Capital of Words”
- 19 Spaces ofYidishkayt: New York in American Yiddish Prose
- 20 Landscapes: America and the Americas
- 21 Across the Border: Canadian Jewish Writing
- Part IV Creating Fields
- Part V New Perspectives
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter suggests that landscape offers an especially productive lens through which to re-envision Jewish American literary studies in hemispheric terms. Postcolonial critiques of New World landscape representation articulated by contemporary visual artists such as Kent Monkman, Jin-me Yoon, and Roseângela Rennó continue to foreground landscape as a site of New World identity formation even as they present those identities as contested. Twentieth century Jewish North American culture is typically perceived as urban in its orientation. Jewish North American writers engage landscape and nature as a gesture of emplacement in American space. The literary project of Jewish American territorialization echoes and ironically reproduces that of the dominant Euro-American settler society, which seeks to assert its autochthony and belonging to the land. The chapter examines the complexities and contradictions surrounding the deployment of narratives of settlement by what Malissa Phung calls unsettled settlers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature , pp. 413 - 431Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015