Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing

Häftad, Engelska, 2015

AvDonna McCormack

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Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is a critical study of the relationship between bodies, memories and communal witnessing. With a focus on the aesthetics and politics of queer postcolonial narratives, this book examines how unspeakable traumas of colonial and familial violence are communicated through the body. Exploring multisensory epistemologies as queer and anti-colonial acts of resistance, McCormack offers an original engagement with collective and public forms of bearing witness that may emerge in response to institutionalized violence. Intergenerational, communal and fragmented narratives are central to this analysis of ethics, witnessing, and embodied memories. Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is the first text to offer a sustained analysis of Judith Butler’s and Homi Bhabha’s intersecting theories of performativity, and to draw out the centrality of witnessing to the performative structure of power. It moves through queer, postcolonial, disability and trauma studies to explore how the repetition of familial violence – throughout multiple generations –may be lessened through an embodied witnessing that is simultaneously painful, disturbing and filled with pleasure. Its focus is selected literary texts by Shani Mootoo, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Ann-Marie MacDonald, and it situates this literary analysis in the colonial histories of Trinidad, Morocco and Canada.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2015-07-30
Mått150 x 228 x 16 mm
Vikt320 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor224
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9781501310898

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Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur
HBTQ+ inom Samhälle och politik

Donna McCormack is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) at the University of Bergen, Norway. She has published a book chapter in the edited collection Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature (2012). She has also published articles in The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, The Journal of West Indian Literature, The Journal of Transatlantic Studies and The Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Acknowledgements Introduction: Embodied Memories Queer Postcolonial Narratives, or A Note on MethodologyPerformative Listening Historicizing WitnessingQueer Postcolonial StructureChapter One: Intergenerational Witnessing in Cereus Blooms at Night Unknowing PainHistoricizing Responsibility Embodied SurvivalIntergenerational Witnessing Chapter Two: Monstrous Witnessing in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable Embodied StoriesLinguistic TouchingMonstrous EncountersTactile CorrespondenceEmbodied AllegoriesPerformative PainCoda: Eyes at the Tips of the Fingers: Materializing the Self in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Nuit sacrée Chapter Three: Fossil Witnessing in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees Unknowing the FamilyWitnessing Photographs Painting MemoriesMemories as StorytellingIntergenerational FossilsConclusion: Silent Bodies, or Speaking with the Body Decolonizing NormativityVisceral Storytelling, or Multisensory EpistemologiesPerformative EndingsEmbodied EncountersBibliography Index

This book offers a wonderfully nuanced overview of the intersection of several important critical strands in contemporary literary-cultural theory: queer, feminist, affect, postcolonial, diaspora, trauma, the body, the sensory and more. McCormack navigates between these diverse strands with elegance and verve, suggesting evenmore promiscuous possibilities for critical intersections while also critiquing the limits and blind spots of some approaches.