Interview with Stephanie Pridgeon, author of “Absorption Narratives: Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the Cultural Imaginary of the Americas”

Stephanie Pridgeon, PhD, is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies at Bates College. Her first book, Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film, was published by University of Toronto Press in 2020. Her recent book is Absorption Narratives: Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the Cultural Imaginary of the Americas (University of Toronto Press, 2025).

Your new book is Absorption Narratives: Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the Cultural Imaginary of the Americas. How would you describe it to people who have not read it yet? What is the big idea?

In the United States, we tend to talk about race in largely binary terms. In Latin America (Mexico and Central and South America), race is talked about as a spectrum (or caste system, historically) based on various degrees of racial mixture between European, Black, and Indigenous (and sometimes Asian) races. So, it comes as little surprise that the complexity of how Jewish identities (which in some ways are and in some ways are not discrete ethnic categories–like Ashkenazi or Sephardi) intersect with other ethnic and racial categories would vary a great deal between these different parts of the Americas. And there is a surprising amount of fiction from throughout North, South, and Central America that explicitly uses the term “absorption” to talk about encounters or mixture between Jewish identities and Black or Indigenous identities in ways that, I argue, relate to these paradigms in meaningful ways.

What drew you to this topic? And was it just the right topic for you or is there also a "right now" element?

I’m the kind of academic whose projects are interwoven in a way that’s not always linear; I come back to certain topics and ideas over time. So, there’s kind of a long back story to this book: I wrote my dissertation on Argentine films and novels from the mid-1990s to 2010s that were revisiting revolutionary political movements of the 1970s in ways that sought to problematize assumptions about identities based on group categories. Jewishness was a really important element there and led to my first book, Revolutionary Visions. While working on my dissertation, I happened to read The Human Stain for the first time and realized that Roth was doing something really interesting with Jewishness and race in the context of late-1990s political sensibilities in the U.S. that kind of seemed to beg for a side-by-side analysis with the questions I was looking at. I thought of this book as something very far removed from my dissertation topic, but in retrospect the throughlines are clearer to me (and pretty exciting!)

Over the next several years, I kept finding and reading novels and stories that were complicating how we think about race and Jewish identities in really provocative ways. Then after I started drafting the book in earnest in early 2020, there definitely ended up being a very “right now” (to the time I was writing it) element of the book that I hadn’t anticipated. In the epilogue, I talk about an opinion piece from 2020 in The New York Times by Moustafa Bouyami, an English professor who studies Arab-American literature, exploring why the Muslim immigrant family who ran Cup Foods would have called the cops on George Floyd in the first place.  Bouyami chronicles the policies that have allowed police and city officials to coerce non-Black immigrants into working in their favor and against Black people, “compelling shopkeepers into doing the police’s work for them.” We observe similar tendencies in the ways that Jewishness has largely become “absorbed” into whiteness because of broader paradigms of white supremacy. So, I’d been thinking about this project in different ways for a long time, but there was something unexpectedly timely about drafting it in 2020.

What is something you think people often get wrong about absorption narratives?

I think the term “absorption” is a function of how people talk about racial mixing in ways that are imprecise and limiting. So, I’m definitely not advocating for absorption as a model for how to think about race. But I think a critical framework that accounts not just for the phenomenon that categories of racial identities mix or converge but rather how these discrete categories do or do not mix or coexist or converge and why. And these “how” vary wildly among Latin American nations and even more so between Latin America and the U.S/Canada.

Your book draws on literature, what kind of a source is literature? What does it offer that other types of sources don't?

Storytelling tells us a lot about how an individual, a group, or a society thinks about themselves in relation to others… What they tell us is based in part on what the texts literally say and also on how we read them. So, in this book I’m advocating for comparative readings that interpret texts from different nations and regions alongside one another. I also get super specific in my framework of different literary tropes and what they tell us about how individuals and groups understand themselves and how they understand people who are different from them, how they delineate those boundaries. My thinking is that different figures of literature speak to different types of relationship (whether of mixture, convergence, or divergence) between groups of people. Different literary tropes are also associated with specific identity groups in relation to colonialism and legacies of racism. There are also some opportunities to think through appropriation in new ways when we look at fiction and how authors tell stories about themselves in relation to others.

Your book is comparative, why was that important to you? What would we miss if we only looked at experiences in one country?

There are paradigms of colonialism, migrations, and memory that affect groups throughout the various nations of North, South, and Central America in ways that, while specific to each nation and group, also share certain overarching themes. Comparative readings allow us to account for what is similar and what is different within these paradigms in ways that teach us about the specific contexts at hand as well as about these broader paradigms.

Your book is about things in "the Americas"--how would you define "the Americas?" Is the best definition geographic, cultural, time period, etc.?

This is such a great question that makes me think about the significance of this term in a way I hadn’t before! It’s obviously geographic but, now that you ask, it’s also absolutely temporally bound: I’m thinking about North, Central, and South America in the time after and as a consequence of European colonization, the Atlantic slave trade, and Jewish immigration (from Europe as well as from other countries like Syria, Morocco, and Turkey) to the region.

I would guess that Americans from the United States especially don't often think about themselves in the context of "the Americas." Why do you think that is? How would things be different if they did?

This is a point I repeat often with my students (probably far too often for their liking): in Spanish, “América” means North, South, and Central America. (In South America, children grow up learning there are five continents rather than seven: Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and “América.”) So, when people say “americano” in Spanish it could be referring to Latin America or Canada rather than the U.S. The reason I bring this up so often with my students is because it’s not just that it’s not an exact translation between what people mean when they say “America” in English and “América” in Spanish, but because this discrepancy in translation (what’s called a semantic gap in linguistics) speaks to differing worldviews. And these differing worldviews bring us back to the point of why it’s important to do comparative readings sometimes.

Your previous book, Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film was obviously centered on film. How different is it working primarily with literature versus film? Or is it largely the same?

I talk about film and television in a couple of chapters in Absorption Narratives, but the majority of the analysis is centered on novels. As I described above, I’m really focused on how figurative language is used in these works. Obviously, figurative language abounds in film as well, but the same emphasis on the relationships between authors, narrators, and other subjects is not as prevalent in my first book. What is consistent between the two is an emphasis on narrative as a way of articulating individual and collective memory.

People sometimes forget that academic authors are still authors. What is your process as a writer? How do you go about writing a book like this?

Well, this book followed a process that was unique in a lot of ways because I wrote most of it in 2020, when I was on sabbatical and the world was in quarantine. So, while I wouldn’t recommend that process to other writers, I did have a lot of interrupted writing time. I had published one part of what’s now a chapter of the book as an article in 2018, so I’d been thinking about it for a while. Although I had planned to do research trips for this book, I decided to draft as much as I could and then reached a point at which it seemed like the archival sources I had hoped to consult were not completely necessary (although they would likely have made the book more interesting!). I generally like to have a few different projects that are in different stages at the same time, and that was what happened during that sabbatical.

I am sure you have many other ideas for books, etc. What's next?

Right now I’m beginning a third book that explores literature from throughout Latin America (so far, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina) that incorporates references to visual imagery (photography and muralism) from the Mexican Revolution. While the book is focused primarily on literary analysis, I am reading and learning a lot about visual arts as I get into this project.

Are there any books or films related to your research interests that you regularly recommend to others?

Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman play Fires in the Mirror is a really powerful piece that beautifully encapsulates the complexities of coexistence among different groups.

Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice