Reading Mennonite Writing

<p>Mennonite literature has long been viewed as an expression of community identity. However scholars in Mennonite literary studies have urged a reconsideration of the field's past and a reconceptualization of its future. This is exactly what Reading Mennonite Writing does.</p><p>Drawing on the transnational turn in literary studies Robert Zacharias positions Mennonite literature in North America as a mode of circulation and reading rather than an expression of a distinct community. He tests this reframing with a series of methodological experiments that open new avenues of critical engagement with the field's unique configuration of faith-based intercultural difference. These include cross-sectional readings in nonnarrative literary history; archival readings of transatlantic life writing; Canadian rewritings of Mexican film's deployment of Mennonite theology as fantasy; an examination of the fetishistic structure of ethnicity as a thing that has enabled Mennonite identity to function in a post-identity age; and finally a tentative reinvestment in ideals of Mennonite community via the surprising routes of queerness and speculative fiction. In so doing Zacharias reads Mennonite writing in North America as a useful case study in the shifting position of minor literatures in the wake of the transnational turn.</p><p>Theoretically sophisticated this study of minor transnationalism will appeal to specialists in Mennonite literature and to scholars working in the broader field of transnational literary studies.</p>