Challenging Binaries and Unfencing Fields

Abstract

Bryan Cheyette is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Reading, where he directs the Identities and Minorities research group. His comparative research focuses on critical ‘race’ theory, postcolonial literature and theory, diasporic literature, Holocaust testimony, and, more recently, the social history of the ghetto. In January 2019, the Warwick Memory Group invited Bryan Cheyette to give a public lecture on ‘The Ghetto as Travelling Concept’, in the light of his forthcoming A Very Short Introduction to the Ghetto (2020), and a workshop on ‘Unfenced Fields in Academia and Beyond’. In a wide-ranging interview, Bryan Cheyette speaks of the interconnections between Jewish studies and postcolonial studies, bringing these into dialogue with memory discourses and our contemporary moment.
 Image of Prof Cheyette, photo credit Cesar Rodriguez

Mobilizing MSA Forward

“…Memory Studies Association (MSA) Forward, like memory studies at large, is a multidisciplinary scholarly community that engages in dialogue with cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and Jewish studies, to name a few fertile fields of exchange. As we noted in our introduction to an interview with literary studies scholar and author of Diasporas of the Mind , Bryan Cheyette, “[r]ather than supplanting one another, these fields overlap, intersect, and cross-pollinate” (Teichler and Vince, 2019a: 95). Such intersections enable what Mieke Bal calls “travelling concepts” (Bal, 2002) which in turn relate to “traveling culture” (Clifford, 1986, 1992), a notion that Astrid Erll (2011) draws on in her conceptualization of “travelling memory.” According to Erll (2011), “much of the actual semantic shape that travelling memory takes on will be the result of the routes it takes in specific contexts” (p. 15).…”