Abstract
In ‘Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies’ (2011), Irene Visser asks to what extent trauma theories are genuinely productive in a postcolonial context. She questions, for example, the apparent Eurocentric psychoanalytical emphasis, contextualised by the trauma of the Holocaust, on melancholia and configurations of aporia; and the related neglect of models of healing and renewal based on non-Western belief systems and practices.1 However, historically, the Holocaust radically undermined Eurocentrism, as it shattered belief in the superiority of European civilisation and evolutionary progress and brought home, as Aimé Césaire cogently writes in his Discourse on Colonialism (1955), the holocausts practised in the colonies, long sustained and justified by the same racist philosophies and ideologies that had fuelled fascism.2 The Holocaust and post-war challenges to European imperialism are implicated in each other. Particularly in the context of Caribbean and former French slave colonies, Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis since the 1950s has consistently informed interpretations by postcolonial theorists, educated in French philosophy and culture, of the traumatised colonial subject, while undergoing revisions and challenges,3 a productive dissonance that has continued and intensified in the context of contemporary postcolonial/neocolonial writing.
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Notes
Irene Visser, ‘Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47:3 (2011), 270–82.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham ([1955] New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
Kant and Hegel Black People in the British Empire (London: Pluto Press, 1989).
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann ([1952] London: Pluto Press, 1986).
Édouard Glissant, ‘The Known, the Uncertain’, in Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash ([1981] Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 13–95 (65–6).
Hortense Spillers, ‘All the Things You Could Be Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’, in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian and Helen Moglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 135–59 (139).
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Gay Wilentz, Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-Ease (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000).
Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 147.
V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men ([1967] London: Penguin, 1978), 146.
Laura Brown, ‘Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 100–12.
Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (New York: Avon Books, 1996), 198–9.
Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (London: Routledge, 1992), 57–94 (68–9).
Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 119.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus ([1980] Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Elizabeth Grosz, in Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Nancy K. Miller’s ‘Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic’ (in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 270–95.
Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 10.
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© 2015 Marie Josephine Diamond
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Diamond, M.J. (2015). Rape, Representation and Metamorphosis in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night . In: Ward, A. (eds) Postcolonial Traumas. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526434_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526434_12
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