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The Question Of “Solidarity” In Postcolonial Trauma Fiction: Beyond The Recognition Principle, Hamish Dalley

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Dominant theorizations of cultural trauma often appeal to the twinned notions of “recognition” and “solidarity”, suggesting that by inviting readers to recognize distant suffering, trauma narratives enable forms of cross-cultural solidarity to emerge. This paper explores and critiques that argument with reference to postcolonial literature. It surveys four areas of postcolonial trauma, examining works that narrate traumatic experiences of the colonized, colonizers, perpetrators and proletarians. It explores how novelists locate traumatic affects in the body, and suggests that Frantz Fanon’s model of racial trauma in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth remains essential for the interpretation …

Deborah Shapple's British Colonial Realism In Africa: Inalienable Objects, Contested Domains (Review), Hamish Dalley

Articles & Book Chapters

Excerpt:

Since the publication of Edward W. Said’s Culture and Imperialism in 1994, postcolonial literary critics have usually treated nineteenth-century European fiction as ideologically and imaginatively complicit with the major powers’ attempts to occupy, control, and reorganise distant territories. Deborah Shapple Spillman’s British Colonial Realism in Africa adds weight and nuance to this argument. She demonstrates how late nineteenth-century colonial realist texts—both literary and ethnographic—drew upon structures of thought that allowed unfamiliar peoples to be subsumed within Eurocentric world views.