Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning

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Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning
J.M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison

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Sam Durrant - Author

SUNY series, Explorations in Postcolonial Studies

Price: $35.00
Hardcover - 152 pages

Release Date: December 2003

ISBN10: 0-7914-5945-4
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-5945-4

Price: $29.95
Paperback - 152 pages

Release Date: January 2006

ISBN10: 0-7914-5946-2
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-5946-1

Price: $29.95
Electronic - 152 pages

Release Date: February 2012

ISBN10: N/A
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-8575-0

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Summary

A cross-cultural analysis of the work of Coetzee, Harris and Morrison, demonstrating that the fundamental task of postcolonial narrative is the work of mourning.

Sam Durrant’s powerfully original book compares the ways in which the novels of J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison memorialize the traumatic histories of racial oppression that continue to haunt our postcolonial era. The works examined bear witness to the colonization of the New World, U.S. slavery, and South African apartheid, histories founded on a violent denial of the humanity of the other that had traumatic consequences for both perpetrators and victims. Working at the borders of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and drawing inspiration from recent work on the Holocaust, Durrant rethinks Freud’s opposition between mourning and melancholia at the level of the collective and rearticulates the postcolonial project as an inconsolable labor of remembrance.

“…I appreciated Durrant’s skillful assessment of these postcolonial authors and enjoyed the challenge of applying another interpretive frame to their works.” — Kimberly W. Segall, JAC

"Written with great flair and considerable passion, this book is a sophisticated and theoretically rich elaboration of some of the thematic obsessions that inform postcolonial fiction. Durrant demonstrates successfully how each of the authors and her/his fictive strategies cope with the mnemonic burden of 'being postcolonial.' Equally admirable is the ease with which Durrant combines nuanced literary analysis with bold and well-informed theoretical speculation." — R. Radhakrishnan, author of Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location

"There are a number of impressive things about this book: it combines theory with practice; the argument is clear and carefully signaled throughout; the selection of Coetzee, Harris, and Morrison is a stroke of genius that allows Durrant to reinforce his theoretical claims in a consistent manner; and Durrant avoids both celebrating and politicizing his chosen texts." — Vijay Mishra, author of Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime

Sam Durrant is Lecturer of English at the University of Leeds.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Specters of Colonialism

1. Speechless before Apartheid: J. M. Coetzee's Inconsolable Works of Mourning

2. Rites of Communion: Wilson Harris's Hosting of History

3. Keeping It in the Family: Passing on Racial Memory in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Conclusion: Some Kind of Community

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Related Subjects

Cultural Studies
Literary Criticism
Postcolonial Studies
Psychoanalysis

41911/44931(JFB/LDS/MC)