Dybek’s Diaspora

Stuart Dybek’s short story collection The Coast of Chicago (1991) examines an ethnicity that is “irreparable”—a term borrowed from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose work, The Coming Community (1993), argues for a subjectivity “freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the ine ability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal” (1). For Agamben, an “irreparable” subjectivity is not a choice between a singularity that cannot be spoken (since language creates universal categories), and a universal that, by making subjects intelligible via categories, obscures all that is singular or di erent about them. The chapter will proceed by fi rst framing my central term-“subjectivity,” as illuminated by Agamben-and the utopian context it raises, and then by examining selected stories in The Coast of Chicago to suggest that Dybek fi nds in second-and third-generation subjectivity (what critic Thomas Gladsky has termed “trans-ethnic”) a similar dwelling on the threshold between the singularity of cultural disassociation and the universality of cultural identifi cation. In Dybek, the irreparable subjectivity of second-and third-generation characters-neither explicitly ethnic, nor without ethnicity-enables a community characterized by relation rather than categorical identifi cation.