Wandering Signifier

While Jews figure in the work of many modern Latin American writers, the question of how - and toward what ends - they are represented has received remarkably little critical attention. Rectifying this omission in literary criticism, Erin Graff Zivin traces the symbolic presence of Jews and Jewishness in late nineteenth through late-twentieth-century aesthetic works from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and Nicaragua. Ultimately, Graff Zivin's investigation of literary representations of Jewishness reveals a broader, more complex anxiety surrounding difference in modern Latin American culture. In her readings of Spanish American and Brazilian fiction, Graff Zivin highlights inventions of Jewishness, showing how the concept is constructed as a rhetorical device. She argues that Jewishness functions as a wandering signifier that, while not wholly empty, can be infused with meaning based on the needs of the textual project in question.She maintains that just as Jews in Latin America possess distinct histories relative to their European and North American counterparts, they also occupy different symbolic spaces in the cultural landscape. Graff Zivin suggests that in Latin American fiction, anxiety, desire, paranoia, attraction, and repulsion toward Jewishness are always in tension with (or representative of) larger attitudes toward otherness, whether racial, sexual, religious, national, economic, or metaphysical. She concludes "The Wandering Signifier" with an inquiry into whether it is possible to ethically represent the other within the literary text, or whether the act of representation necessarily involves the objectification of the other.