Cultures of diasporas: the margin and the mainstream in jewish-romanian and jewish-american literatures

The project proposed for financing has been deemed as necessary within the Romanian post-communist, post-EU-accession framework, as it aims to contribute to a significant extent, at the academic/university level, to the positive tackling of the complex problems created by the transition from an ethnically defined democracy to a liberal republican one. Its main objective is to identify the coordinates marking the evolution of the relationships between ethnic groups and their host nations, as reflected and artistically sublimated in the literary text, approached from an interdisciplinary point of view as a social, historical and political document.

Briefly, the issues discussed are: minority group’s assimilation and dissimilation strategies, stereotypes and essentialising / antisemitic constructs developed by the mainstream, and instances of tolerance and commonality in both minority and mainstream literary texts. The comparative research method (postcolonial – foucauldian perspective) used in this endeavour contrasts, for the first time in the history of ethnic studies, two minority literatures (Jewish-Romanian and Jewish-American), and their corresponding mainstream literary texts (Romanian and American) in point of their renditions of ethnic minority-national majority relationships.
By comparing two ethnic minorities to the two types of mainstream groups from two states (Romania and the U.S.A.) founded on opposite ideologies, we intend to obtain the necessary experimental framework for analysing the nature of these relationships, as well as for supporting our assumption that the literary text as a hybrid allows for the establishment of a dialogue between two totally opposing views, and for the deconstruction of essentialising ethnic narratives.