10th Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA): “Arrivals and Departures,” Long Beach, CA (Apr. 2008)
Seminar description
As a grand narrative of radical transformation, the Biblical narrative of Exodus has been used to model, explain and produce political, theological and social change. Yet it has also been used to cement particular racial, religious and national identities and to establish a sense of continuity with the past. Particularly in the last three centuries, a number of literary authors, composers, film-makers and political leaders have turned to Exodus as a source of inspiration. Each version embraces particular events and characters of the Biblical narrative while it suppresses others. For example, while Michael Walzer focuses on the liberatory potential of the Exodus narrative, Edward Said emphasizes the ways in which it has been used to support colonial conquest, domination and oppression. So too, while Walzer and Said emphasize the secular political potential of Exodus, Jonathan Boyarin recalls the explicitly religious contexts in which it has been used. This seminar will use Exodus as a point of departure to explore the tensions between spiritual redemption and earthly political action, between universalist liberation movements and particular ethnic-religious interventions, between utopian dreams of the future and visionary appropriations of particular pasts, and between departures and arrivals.
Abstracts (in alphabetical order)
Erin Battat (Harvard University)
American Exodus: Black and White Migration Narratives in the Depression Era
During the Great Depression, the American public became fascinated by the epic of the migrations of poor rural people—black and white—to the urban North and West. Inverting the national story of prosperity and progress, these stories challenge the fundamental tenets of American national identity. As Michael Denning notes, "with its biblical archetype and its historical centrality…the migration as exodus came to be one of the grand narratives, the tall tales, of the mid-century United States." Comparing two photo-books of the late Depression, Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s American Exodus and Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s 12 Million Black Voices, my paper examines the uses of the Exodus myth in representing black and white migration. Superimposing the slave narrative upon the frontier story, Lange and Taylor secularize the Exodus story and reverse its process of ethnogenesis, so that regional and racial subgroups are reborn as a multicultural, modern proletariat. Conversely, Wright builds upon the tradition of black evangelicalism to tell a story of spiritual and political salvation, narrating the birth of an urban black nation. Moreover, the “promised land” of black and white migrants differs, with white migrants seeking the materialist vision of a “land of milk and honey,” and black migrants seeking what Michael Walzer call the promise of “holiness,” or a more spiritual notion of liberation. My paper will comare these “grand narratives” of migration-as-exodus through analysis of both word and image.
Anna Bernard (University of York)
“We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere”: The Palestinian “Exodus”
This paper begins by considering the use of the term “exodus” to describe the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from present-day Israel. While Edward Said’s critique of Michael Walzer is an important reminder that Jewish liberation in Israel was achieved through Palestinian dispossession, his essay does not address the widespread use, in English and other European languages, of the word “exodus” to describe the Palestinian experience itself. Said also does not comment on the parallels between Exodus and the Muslim narrative of the Hijra (Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina), which is the term used to describe the Palestinian expulsion in Arabic (al-hijra al-filasteeniya). Two of Walzer’s characterizations of Exodus – its linear movement towards liberation and its function as a narrative of the origins of a community – apply equally well to the Hijra. Using Ghassan Kanafani’s classic novella, Rijal fi al-shams (Men in the Sun, 1963), and Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Nasaafer ka-an-nas” (“We travel like other people,” 1983) as examples, I go on to argue that post-1948 Palestinian writing both draws upon and subverts the linear model of liberation and redemption. Kanafani and Darwish’s protagonists journey in search of liberation but are propelled either to their deaths (Kanafani) or “to nowhere” (Darwish). In these texts, although 1948 functions as an originary moment in the formation of the Palestinian people, its decidedly non-emancipatory character undermines the Exodus and Hijra narratives’ applicability as explanatory paradigms in the Palestinian context.
Scott Langston (University of North Texas/Texas Christian University)
From Oppressed to Oppressor: Exploring Exodus' Potential
Oppressed groups from a variety of times and settings have commonly appropriated the liberating power of the biblical exodus. The exodus story, however, has also proven to have oppressive potential, where one group’s liberation becomes another’s oppression. The biblical story itself suggests this possibility as the Israelites, once freed from Egyptian slavery, moved into Canaan and attempted to dominate the local inhabitants. Later readers have not overlooked this movement from oppressed to oppressor. Two of these, Lincoln Steffens and Lawrence Langner, explore the exodus as a contemporary manifestation of both liberation and oppression in their respective works, "Moses in Red: The Revolt of Israel as a Typical Revolution" (1926) and "Moses: A Play, a Protest, and a Proposal" (1924). Steffens, a famous muckraker of the Progressive era, uses his experiences with the Russian and Mexican revolutions to understand the exodus as a revolution, albeit one that, like its modern counterparts, “ran straight to a dictatorship.” While Steffens identifies the exodus’ potential for political oppression, Langner, a producer, writer, director, and founder of the Theatre Guild in New York, understands this potential in social and cultural terms, decrying modern industrialism and advocating greater artistic expression. These renditions critique what both authors perceive to be contemporary problems stemming in part from the influence of the biblical story. Using the perspectives of Steffens and Langner, this paper will explore the exodus’ oppressive potential, as well as the influence of the reader’s environment in shaping one’s use of the text.
Francisco Martin (California State University San Marcos)
Perspectives on the 15th-Century Exodus of Spanish Arabs and Jews
This study examines the dynamics of the 15th-century exodus of Spanish Arabs and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, and its effects on modern events related to both cultures and peoples. It explores the concept of Galut in the ‘Sephardic’ mind, and its distinct manifestation in the mind of the ‘Andalusie’ culture. How is it conceivable that for an ethnic group in a given land, this concept could have been so important, while in another neighboring group it could have been downplayed to the point that they negotiated it away? Is there a connection between today’s world events, and the different mindsets of these two groups for whom the concept of exile from their common land of Sepharad/Al-Andalus stood in such stark contrast to one another? After all, these two groups of people came from the same land, and shared, at one point in time, the same values and the same culture, if not the same religion. Could the weight of a religion-specific exodus narrative have been so great that it could have shaped the outcome of their experience when facing the same hardship of exile? Could the consequences of this outcome be directly related today to the same religious cause? This paper offers a discussion of these concepts, within the broader context of departures and arrivals.
Sarah Mechlovitz (Hebrew University)
Tricks of Memory: Slavery in Egypt and the Haggadah
The story of Joseph’s life in *Genesis*, which leaves us off exactly at the beginning of the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt, is a richly layered tale of multiple rises and falls at the wheel of fortune, a messy mix of slavery and supremacy. His name (like Moses’) is never mentioned in the Haggadah. Why not and what of the exodus is remembered? My paper explores this question and argues that with the repression of figures who assume powerful positions, the Haggadah reduces the complex biblical narrative of the Israelite slavery and redemption into an event that stands as if suspended in time: a sacred triad of slavery, redemption and punishment (symbolized by pesach, matzo, and marror) into which the gentile-Jewish relationship is solidly petrified. History in the Haggadah, as Yerushalmi writes in *Zakhor*, does not march on or even repeat itself; time rather collapses into an eternal contradiction of Jews suffering at the hands of their enemies and being redeemed by God. At once beloved and persecuted, faith in God is the only counterbalance to gentile persecution. The scales of justice are balanced completely differently in my reading—guided by Zakovitch’s *And You Shall Tell Your Son*—of the final chapters of *Genesis*. The story of Egyptian servitude to Joseph, which directly precedes and mirrors the story of Joseph’s descendants’ servitude to the Egyptians, beautifully demonstrates that oppression is not a matter of identity, but a social structure that can turn on you at any time.
James Mellis (Temple University)
Zora Neale Hurston's Exodus
My paper will examine the Exodus motif as it is represented by Zora Neale Hurston. Throughout Hurston's career, she continually returned to the Old Testament as a way to negotiate her own identity politics and that of African-Americans in the United States. My paper looks at her short story, "The Fire and the Cloud," her descriptions of Moses from her anthropological collection "Tell My Horse" and her 1939 novel, "Moses, Man of the Mountain" in light of Hurston's project to reclaim what she believed were African-American religious and cultural themes that had been appropriated by mainstream (white) American culture. Using Hurston's varied representations of Moses and the Mosaic myth in her work, I show how the Exodus story developed into a sounding board for Hurston that allowed her to critique contemprary African-American and American racial politics and leadership. Hurston's feeing that she was "enslaved" by various patrons including Charlotte Osgood Mason, W.E.B. DuBois, Alian Locke, Fannie Hurst, Annie Nathan Meyer, her academic mentor Franz Boas and a white dominated publishing industry all come into play as Hurston continually returns to the Exodus myth to protest against, and develop a theory of, leadership for African-American culture and politics.
Robert Patterson (Florida State University)
When and Where I Enter: Gender, Sexuality, Exodus, and African American Political Strategies
Reinforcing the notion that African Americans’ civil rights are both God-given and God-protected, the Exodus narrative has been used as a paradigmatic text from which African Americans have conceptualized their struggles for political enfranchisement. From slavery until the modern Civil Rights movement, the notion that a Moses-like figure, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., who would be responsible for leading a large scale civil rights movement for racial rights permeated the African American political consciousness. The deaths of heterosexual male civil rights leaders such as King and Malcolm X, the presence of women such as Fannie Lou Hamer and gay black men such as Bayard Rustin, however, challenged this popular notion of the only heterosexual male Moses-like figures. Moreover, an emerging concern for women’s and gay rights within black communities also problematized a notion of enfranchisement that emphasized “racial” rights without demanding gender or sexual rights, or, in some cases, while promoting oppression on the basis of gender and sexuality. This paradox of the Exodus story, I argue, undermines its ability to be the most effective strategy for political enfranchisement in the contemporary era where political strategies of mobilization and definitions of civil rights have changed; the term civil rights extends beyond racial privileges and rights and includes those of gender and sexuality, and identity politics organized exclusively around category of race have declined.
Eliza Slavet (University of California, San Diego)
Exodus: Where We're From and What's Left Behind
Most accounts of Exodus focus on those who have left and where they have gone. Yet lurking within these narratives are questions about that which is left behind. Taking Exodus as a broad narrative structure, I propose to focus on the people and the structures that remain in the “Land of Egypt.” More specifically, in response to works by Michael Walzer, Edward Said and Jonathan Boyarin, I propose to read Exodus in terms of a movement toward secularization, as a departure from the enslavement to tradition that resists change. In shifting the focus to the Egyptians, however, I plan to explore how secularism is persistently defined by that which is (supposedly) left behind. How can we use Exodus as a way to think about not only the desires for freedom, but also the longing for that which remains? Can we begin to think about those who (unwittingly?) find themselves in the position of the Egyptians, enslaved by structures which they cannot (and perhaps do not wish to) escape? Rather than assuming that the distinctions between the Israelites and Egyptians are absolute, how can we make sense of the subtle shifts between these categories? Given that freed slaves can quickly become slavedrivers, can we re-envision Exodus as a constant process rather than a teleological motion toward defined goals? In examining religion and secularity in this context, can we imagine “exodus” as a struggle to maintain tensions between categories, or is it always shaped by a narrative drive toward a “promised land”?