Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 41memory of her mother and father, both of whom met violent deaths
in the initial stages of the Shoah. Thus, not only does her persecution
force her to become physically implicated in the Nazi atrocities, it
also compels her to cleave her consciousness into two: the obedient,
self-abnegating automaton, coldly separated from emotional distress
on one side and, on the other, the terrified subject witnessing first-
hand her experiences in a concentration camp.
Such a duality of consciousness resonates with the ideas of “dou-
ble consciousness” developed by Du Bois—and, later, Gilroy—to
account for the challenging and often hazardous mental strategies
that blacks in Europe and America are compelled to use to function
and integrate into society.^39 Building upon the concepts of W. E. B.
Du Bois, Gilroy ties this phenomenon to the experience of modern
life, arguing that it involves an “unsteady location simultaneously
inside and outside the connections, assumptions, and aesthetic rules
which distinguish and periodize modernity.”^40 H o w e v e r , G i l r o y —
and, indeed, Du Bois—are also explicit in declaring that “doubling”
(the construction of a double consciousness by blacks in Europe and
America that is prompted by the disorienting effects of modernity
and historical oppression) is not exclusive to the African Diaspora but
occurs in other ethnic groups that have endured similar experiences
of displacement and discrimination.^41 Indeed, Gilroy also makes a
point of reminding the reader that “the term ‘diaspora’ comes into
the vocabulary of black studies and the practice of pan-Africanist
politics from Jewish thought.”^42 Such an attempt to find patterns in
the strategies and characteristics of historically oppressed minority
groups also emerges in the work of Jameson, who goes as far as to
declare that the very essence of their cultural identity is shaped by
the experience and fear of persecution. Any “conception of cultural
tradition and transmission,” he writes, “must begin with this shared
fear of the ethnic group, which accounts for cultural cohesion and
identity as a symbolic response to [... ] the situation of danger and
threat.”^43 By finding such parallels in the lives of oppressed minori-
ties, Gilroy and Jameson provide a valuable framework with which
to gain further insight into the broader sociohistorical implications
of the psychological processes adopted by characters such as Eva
Stern and other protagonists enduring similar experiences.