Robert Zacharias, a leading voice in the scholarly conversation on Mennonite literature (often stylized as “Mennonite/s Writing”), has written a groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting study examining the relationship between literature by and about Mennonites, and the critical reflection upon that literature. Reading Mennonite Writing: A Study in Minor Transnationalism does a number of things that I will only be able to highlight briefly in this review. These include: challenging the notion that Mennonite literature must draw on myths of origin (as in the scandalous circumstances surrounding the publication of Rudy Wiebe’s Peace Shall Destroy Many [McClelland & Stewart, 1962], which led to author’s dismissal from his position at a denominational magazine), resisting teleological accounts of Mennonite literary discourse that restrict its future trajectories (18), and advocating for the paradigm of “minor transnationalism” as lens for understanding Mennonite literature. For Zacharias and others, minor transnationalism interprets literary production in a way that challenges vertical or hierarchical connections and instead emphasizes circulation and reading practices that span minority, minoritized, and marginalized discourses.
Through case studies analyzing particular literary works and artifacts, Zacharias presents Mennonite literature itself as an embodiment of minor transnationalism, generating new insights for two discourses at once. He writes that “we must be careful not to allow a historicization of the field’s emergence within particular contexts and communities to fully determine its broader parameters of possibilities.” (4). In this way, his aim is to “rough up” what Magdalene Redekop calls the “smooth finish” that glosses inconsistencies in the discourse (4), and he does so by traversing and transgressing “not only geopolitical but also critical and conceptual borders.” (5). By moving beyond the romanticization and disenchantment of Mennonite literature, while refusing gatekeeping discourses of authenticity, Zacharias avoids the tired proclamation of true beginnings or ultimate ends, and offers the best that Mennonite-related literary criticism has to offer through subtle yet incisive readings of well-known and unknown texts.
In a way, reading Mennonite writing as a study in minor transnationalism allows Zacharias to question the importance of traditional “literariness” and “seriousness” and broaden what counts as literature (23). In another way, his work is precisely a form of serious literary criticism—which is not to say that there is a contradiction, but to point to interesting differences between Mennonite literary production and its criticism. Where many self-consciously Mennonite writers engage in both literary production and its criticism (as in the work of Jeff Gundy, Julia Kasdorf, or Daniel Shank Cruz), Zacharias favors the latter in ways that – perhaps playfully – lead me to wonder whether he or others might one day engage in combinations of both genres.
Zacharias argues that “the transnational rhetoric of the field has obscured the ways in which it remains invested in an understanding of Mennonite cultural difference as a form of ethnicity” (24), and he distinguishes clearly between minor discourses that lie outside the mainstream and minority discourses that refer to racialized literary traditions. Through such distinctions, without compromising their critical edge, Zacharias very helpfully seeks to “estrange a presumption of whiteness that the field inherited from its formation as an ethnic minority literature” (25).
Without providing a full review of each of the book’s close readings, I want to conclude by asking a provocative question related to Zacharias’ framing of minority literature and his desire to deepen appreciation of identity categories (28-29), alongside his functional (rather than ontological) definition of Mennonite identity.
What would it mean to reconsider the conceptual basis of the minority/majority distinction without diminishing the real oppression faced by minorities, while also challenging the repetition of the distinction’s normativity in its use as a description of the discourse? Without accusing Zacharias of allowing his descriptions to slip into normativity, I wonder whether a more detailed account of the relationship between the categories of major and minor and the social realities of majorities and minorities might assist in his argument and enrich the discourse? One way to sharpen and contextualize such distinctions would be to attend even more fully to economic and social class.
Zacharias draws upon the works of Slavoj Zizek and Franco Moretti, who are both attentive to class problems in their own way, but such engagements should go further into the economic relations that underpin distinctions between majorities and minorities. One way into this troubled water would be to think about how social and economic class relate to the production of literary works in, by, and about Mennonites, for it is difficult to create the “serious” works of literature that Zacharias looks toward and beyond without the time and money that come with privilege. For example, I wonder what the future of Mennonite life writing and autobiography will look like as the class conditions that allowed certain affluent Mennonites to produce such works transform and change? Can readers expect another generation of Mennonite memoir, or has the time for that passed?
All told, it is a distinct privilege to read Zacharias’s opening of the bibliographic and encyclopedic vision of Mennonite/s writing, and a wonderful experience to follow his reader’s eye across time and texts to his conclusion that the small conversation on Mennonite literature has something to say to the larger world of literary criticism (219).
Maxwell Kennel is a senior research associate at the Dr. Gilles Arcand Centre for Health Equity at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University.
Maxwell Kennel
Date Of Review:
December 13, 2023