Abstract

 

Abstract

 

The creative component consists of extended dialogues and some interpellations between myself and my mother, structured in sections according to mood, presented in a blend of fiction and memoir. Dialogue is deployed as a technique to centre voice and agency. Through these dialogues, I represent my mother’s move from a particular rural Jewish Austrian identity to a middle-class non-Jewish Anglo identity.

 

My mother was silent about her past and my creative work is a response to what I imagine

was her experience of structural anti-Semitism and migration. While the creative component of this study is personal, the exegesis is a commentary that  provides a psycho-social, and poetic exploration of mind states and affective states that are illustrated through the fictional dialogues.

 

The exegesis explores anti-Semitism as a particular form of racism and its instantiation in what I term the Catholic gaze, with regards to my mother’s experience in Austria up until her flight to England in 1938, and subsequently the Protestant gaze. Within the terms of my mother’s psycho-social context, I consider Christo-normativity as a particular structure of racism which she internalised. Central to this is shame. This work will provide an original contribution to understandings of micro dynamics of structural anti-Semitism utilising critical theories of race and affect, and how this played out in a move from a normative Jewish identity to one in w