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Full Description
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.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Embodied Memories
Queer Postcolonial Narratives, or A Note on Methodology
Performative Listening
Historicizing Witnessing
Queer Postcolonial Structure
Chapter One: Intergenerational Witnessing in Cereus Blooms at Night
Unknowing Pain
Historicizing Responsibility
Embodied Survival
Intergenerational Witnessing
Chapter Two: Monstrous Witnessing in Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'Enfant de sable
Embodied Stories
Linguistic Touching
Monstrous Encounters
Tactile Correspondence
Embodied Allegories
Performative Pain
Coda: 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 Family
Witnessing Photographs
Painting Memories
Memories as Storytelling
Intergenerational Fossils
Conclusion: Silent Bodies, or Speaking with the Body
Decolonizing Normativity
Visceral Storytelling, or Multisensory Epistemologies
Performative Endings
Embodied Encounters
Bibliography
Index
