Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing

Donna McCormack is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Women’s 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 Women’s 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.

This book offers a wonderfully nuanced overview of the intersection of several important critical strands in contemporary literary-cultural theory: queer, feminist, affect, postcolonial, diaspora, trauma, the body, the sensory and more. McCormack navigates between these diverse strands with elegance and verve, suggesting evenmore promiscuous possibilities for critical intersections while also critiquing the limits and blind spots of some approaches.

• Acknowledgements Introduction: Embodied Memories Queer Postcolonial Narratives, or A Note on MethodologyPerformative Listening Historicizing WitnessingQueer Postcolonial StructureChapter One: Intergenerational Witnessing in Cereus Blooms at Night Unknowing PainHistoricizing Responsibility Embodied SurvivalIntergenerational Witnessing Chapter Two: Monstrous Witnessing in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable Embodied StoriesLinguistic TouchingMonstrous EncountersTactile CorrespondenceEmbodied AllegoriesPerformative PainCoda: 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 FamilyWitnessing Photographs Painting MemoriesMemories as StorytellingIntergenerational FossilsConclusion: Silent Bodies, or Speaking with the Body Decolonizing NormativityVisceral Storytelling, or Multisensory EpistemologiesPerformative EndingsEmbodied EncountersBibliography Index