Postcolonial witnessing : trauma out of bounds / Stef Craps.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Craps, Stef.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Minority authors--History and criticism.

English literature.

Psychic trauma in literature.

Postcolonialism in literature.

Wounds and injuries in literature.

Literature and society.

English literature--Minority authors.

Physical Description:

xi, 170 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Summary:

Despite a stated commitment to cross-cultural solidarity, trauma theory-an area of cultural investigation that emerged out of the "ethical turn" affecting the humanities in the 1990s-is marked by a Eurocentric, monocultural bias. This book takes issue with the tendency of the founding texts of the field to marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority groups, and to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity. Moreover, it questions the assumption that a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia is uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma, and criticizes the neglect of the connections between metropolitan and non-Western or minority traumas. Combining theoretical argument with literary case studies, Postcolonial Witnessing contends that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. Book jacket.

Contents:

The trauma of empire

The empire of trauma

Beyond trauma aesthetics

Ordinary trauma in Sindiwe Magona's Mother to mother

Mid-mourning in David Dabydeen's "Turner" and Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the ghosts

Cross-traumatic affiliation

Jewish/postcolonial diasporas in the work of Caryl Phillips

Entangled memories in Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780230230071

0230230075

OCLC:

802691585