Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing

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 Butlers and Homi Bhabhas 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.

Critiques Judith Butler's and Homi Bhaba's theories of performativity by showing how non-institutionalised forms of witnessing serve to reconfigure theories of literary performance

Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is a critically engaged exploration of power and its relation to ethics and bodies. By revisiting and revising Judith Butler's and Homi Bhabha's queer and postcolonial theories of literary performance, McCormack expands current understandings of the performative workings of power through an embodied, multisensory ethics. That remembering is an embodied act which necessitates an undoing of one's sense of self captures how colonial and familial histories silenced by hegemonic structures may only emerge through opaque bodily sensations. These non-institutionalised forms of witnessing serve both to reconfigure theories of performativity, by re-situating the act of witnessing as integral to the workings of power, and to interrogate the current emphasis on speech in trauma studies, by analysing the multifarious, communal and public ways in which memories emerge. In Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing
the body is reinstated as central to both the workings of and the challenges to colonial discourses.

Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is a critically engaged exploration of power and its relation to ethics and bodies. By revisiting and revising Judith Butler's and Homi Bhabha's queer and postcolonial theories of literary performance, McCormack expands current understandings of the performative workings of power through an embodied, multisensory ethics. That remembering is an embodied act which necessitates an undoing of one's sense of self captures how colonial and familial histories silenced by hegemonic structures may only emerge through opaque bodily sensations. These non-institutionalised forms of witnessing serve both to reconfigure theories of performativity, by re-situating the act of witnessing as integral to the workings of power, and to interrogate the current emphasis on speech in trauma studies, by analysing the multifarious, communal and public ways in which memories emerge. In Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing the body is reinstated as central to both the workings of and the challenges to colonial discourses.

Donna McCormack is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Womens 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 Womens 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 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 Jellouns LEnfant 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 Jellouns La Nuit sacrée

Chapter Three: Fossil Witnessing in Ann-Marie MacDonalds 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