Description
Book SynopsisAn interdisciplinary reappraisal of the field of Mennonite writing in Canada and the United States. Essays explore the unique configuration of religious and ethnic cultural difference.
Trade Review“Showcasing some of the best new scholarship in cultural studies, After Identity explodes the tight boundaries of Mennonite culture and points us toward the new literary representations that are redefining Mennonite identity in the twenty-first century. An important book for anyone interested in the debates around culture, identity, and writing in the United States and Canada.”
—Felipe Hinojosa,Texas A&M University
“The twelve essayists in Robert Zacharias’s After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America (to which Zacharias also contributes an introduction and chapter) share in the larger cultural desires to surpass taxonomic or binary thinking, and their collective contributions inquire carefully and seriously into the meaning and the value of the categories of identity such as ‘Mennonite’ and ‘Mennonite writing.’”
—Grace Kehler The Mennonite Quarterly Review
“When a traditional culture enters into a part of the modern, secular realm (academia), how does that traditional culture maintain its sense of identity? After Identity does not attempt to offer simplistic answers to these questions, but it does a superb job of mining the multiple issues that confront the field of Mennonite literature as it attempts to define itself.”
—George Adams Nova Religio
“A vital book that not only expresses the importance of finding alternative reading practices for Mennonite literature, but also presents various compelling and convincing ways to locate those reading practices.”
—Jesse Hutchison Biography
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction After Identity: Mennonite/s Writing in North America
Robert Zacharias
Part 1 Reframing Identity
Chapter 1 The Autoethnographic Announcement and the Story
Julia Spicher Kasdorf
Chapter 2 A Mennonite Fin de Siècle: Exploring Identity at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Royden Loewen
Chapter 3 Mennonite Transgressive Literature
Ervin Beck
Chapter 4 Double Identity: Covering the Peace Shall Destroy Many Project
Paul Tiessen
Chapter 5 After Ethnicity: Gender, Voice, and an Ethic of Care in the Work of Di Brandt and Julia Spicher Kasdorf
Ann Hostetler
Chapter 6 The Mennonite Thing: Identity for a Post-Identity Age
Robert Zacharias
Part 2 Expanding Identity
Chapter 7 In Praise of Hybridity: Reflections from Southwestern Manitoba
Di Brandt
Chapter 8 Queering Mennonite Literature
Daniel Shank Cruz
Chapter 9 Toward a Poetics of Identity
Jeff Gundy
Chapter 10 Question, Answer
Jesse Nathan
Chapter 11 “Is Menno in There?” The Case of “The Man Who Invented Himself”
Magdalene Redekop
Chapter 12 After Identity: Liberating the Mennonite Literary Text
Hildi Froese Tiessen
List of Contributors
Credits
Index
