Bearing Witness: Terror and Trauma in Global Literature
Autumn 2015
Module Code: 947Q3A
Tutors: Denise DeCaires Narain, John Masterson, Minoli Salgado
Convenor: Minoi Salgado (k.m.salgado@sussex.ac.uk)
The module explores the representation of terror, trauma and testimonial address in a range of
contemporary international literary texts. Through a textual and contextual study of these
works, key issues such as the non-narratability of trauma, the ethics of speaking for the other,
the intersection between the politics of reading, writing and bearing witness, the creation of
cross-cultural communities in the representation and reading of trauma, and the relationship
between gender, intimacy and the representation of the body in pain, will be studied in
relation to critical readings from terror and trauma studies. The range of literary texts reflects
the global cultural reach of the module, from postcolonial texts from a wide range of cultural
locations to literatures that engage with critical discourses generated by the Holocaust and the
War on Terror. Opening with an emphasis on cross-cultural connections and critical readings,
the focus on historical positioning becomes more pronounced as the module proceeds.
1. Introductory Seminar: Denise DeCaires Narain, John Masterson, Minoli Salgado
Please come prepared to discuss the required reading (below) in relation to at least one of
the primary texts on the module.
Required Reading
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Preface, Chapters 1
and 2)
Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Chapters 1 and 2)
Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland, ‘Introduction’, The Future of Testimony: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives on Witnessing
Bearing Witness: The Aesthetics of Loss
Tutor: Minoli Salgado (Email:k.m.salgado@sussex.ac.uk)
These seminars will introduce key concepts in trauma theory – non-narratability, history as
haunting, and the ethics of writing and representation - by comparing and contrasting the
different ways in which writers engage with the act of bearing witness to terror and trauma. In
this section terror will be read in relation to critical readings on biopolitics. Opening with a
comparative analysis of Dorfman's Widows (a text that began life as a poem) we will consider
the multiple ways in which Dorfman tries to give voice to 'the unsayable' and articulate the
space of absence marked by enforced disappearance. Are Dorfman's efforts to draw attention
to enforced disappearance more effective in the novel or in the play, and in what ways are
distance and empathy differently mediated in these texts? What are the responsibilities of the
writer as secondary witness and political exile, and those of the reader and audience as
witness? In our next seminar we will consider the ways in which trauma marks a
reconfiguration of place and time by evaluating the landscapes of loss portrayed in the fiction
of Abani and Ondaatje, via an engagement with Mbembe's reading of sovereignty as the right
to kill. How does Mbembe's biopolitical scripting intersect with the presentation of life in
death in these texts? And what are the similarities and differences between Abani's and
Ondaatje's readings of the psychological impact of terror? In our final section, we will
consider Sebald's elegiac engagement with post-Holocaust memory and the way
representation is problematized through a travel narrative that explores the boundaries
between fact and fiction. As Holocaust testimonies have been influential in informing trauma
theory, we will also consider the ways in which the narrative of the Holocaust exists as a site
of exilic witnessing by bringing Sebald's text into alignment with Agamben's seminal text on
bearing witness to this event.
2. Ariel Dorfman and the Disappeared
Required Reading
Primary literary texts:
Ariel Dorfman, Widows: A Novel trans. Stephen Kessler
Ariel Dorfman, Widows (the play) in The Resistance Trilogy
Primary Critical Text: Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
(Preface, Part 1:1; Part 2: 1-5)
Recommended Reading
Sophia A. McClennen, Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope (Chapter 3)
Sandra Young, 'Rehearsing Trauma: The Reader as Interrogator in Prison Narratives', Journal
of Literary Studies, 29:2, 101-116 Available online:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02564718.2013.777146
Idelbar Avelar, 'Five Theses on Torture', Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 10:
3 (2001),
253-271 Available online: www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13569320120090045
The Disappeared and Invisible: Revealing the Enduring Impact of Enforced Disappearance
on Women, International Centre for Transitional Justice (March 2015) Available online as pdf
:Cached
Idelber Avelar's The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task
of Mourning has a useful introduction to critical and contextual issues (without direct
reference to Dorfman) which you can find online:
http://www.tulane.edu/~avelar/intro.html
Michael 'Raul' Brown, 'Finding Peace by Chile's Troubled Waters', 30:3 (Fall 2013)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_central_review/v030/30.3.brown.html
Irina Popescu, 'Rebellious Ghosts and Narrative Silence: Listening to the 'Desaparecidos' in
Ariel Dorfman's Widows' in Public Pain/ Private Poetics: Memory, Crisis and the Global
Community, Exit 9: The Rutgers Journal of Comparative Literature, 11 (2011) Available as
Ebook
3. Deathworlds in Abani and Ondaatje
Required Reading
Primary Literary Texts:
Chris Abani, Song for Night (a novella)
Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
Primary Critical Text:
Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’ trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15:1 (2003) 11-40
Available online:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5t_gfMVp1JIZmZ0NFBkX0xNQmM/view
Recommended Reading
Hamish Dalley, 'Trauma Theory and Nigerian Civil War Literature: speaking 'something that
was never in words' in Chris Abani's Song for Night, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49:4
(2013) 445-457
Available
online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2013.804000#abstract
Francesca Giommi, 'Negotiating Freedom on Scarred Bodies: Chris Abani's Novellas' in
Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures eds. Annalisa Oboe and
Shaul Bassi, 176-184
Madhu Krishnan, 'The Storyteller Function in Contemporary Nigerian Narrative', Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, 49:1 (March 2014), 29-45 Available
online:http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/49/1/29.short
Daria Tunca, Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction (Chapter 6)
Milena Marinkova, ‘Witnessing the Body/The Body Witnessing in Anil’s Ghost’ in Michael
Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing, 80-93
Milena Marinkova, ‘Perceiving in One’s Own Body: The Violence of History, Politics and
Writing – Anil’s Ghost and Witness Writing’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2009),
44:3, 107-125 Available online:
http://jcl.sagepub.com.ezproxy.sussex.ac.uk/content/44/3/107.full.pdf+html
Victoria Burrows, 'The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in Michael Ondaatje's
Anil's Ghost' in Studies in the Novel, 4):1 and 2 (Spring and Summer 2008), 161-177
Antoinette Burton, ‘Archive of Bones: Anil’s Ghost and the Ends of History’, Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, 38 (March 2003), 39-56 Available online:
http://jcl.sagepub.com.ezproxy.sussex.ac.uk/content/38/1.toc
W. Knepper, ‘Confessions, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of Michael Ondaatje’s
Anil’s Ghost’ in C. Matzeke and S Muhleisen (ed) Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction
from a Transcultural Perspective (Rodopi, 2006) 35-57
4. The Archive in W.G.Sebald
Primary Literary Text:
W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants
Primary Critical Texts:
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Chapters 1 and
4)
Katja Garloff, ‘The Emigrant as Witness: W.G. Sebald’s ‘Die Ausgewanderten’, The
German Quarterly, 77:1 (Winter 2004) 76-93 Available online:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3252150
Brad Prager, ‘The Good German as Narrator: On W.G.Sebald and the Risks of
Holocaust Writing’, New German Critique, 96, Memory and the Holocaust (Fall, 2005)
75-102 Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30040979
Recommended Reading
Mark M. Anderson, ‘The Edge of Darkness: On W.G. Sebald’, October, 106 (Autumn 2003)
102-121
Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397634
Stuart Taberner, ‘German Nostalgia? Remembering German-Jewish Life in W.G. Sebald’s Die
Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture and Theory, 79: 3
(2004) 181-202 Available online:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3200/GERR.79.3.181-202
Josephine Carter, W.G.Sebald and the Ethics of a Guilty Conscience’,
Interventions:International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, (2013) 16:5, 730-749 Available
online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2013.858972
Colin Davis, 'Can the Dead Speak to Us? De Man, Levinas and Agamben', Culture, Theory
and Critique, 45:1, 77-89 Available online:
htttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735780410001686469
Dori Laub, ‘An Event without Witness’ (Chapter 3) in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis and History eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub
Gendered Bodies and Intimate Acts of Witnessing in Caribbean Texts
Tutor: Denise deCaires Narain (Email: D.Decaires-Narain@sussex.ac.uk)
5. Speaking and Writing Trauma
Primary Texts: (required reading)
The History of Mary Prince, ed., Sarah Salih
Marlene Nourbese Philip, Zong!
Jamaica Kincaid, Mr Potter
Secondary texts:
Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality, chaps 7 & 8;
‘Can the subaltern speak?’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, P. Williams and L.Chrisman (eds);
‘Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence’,
E.M.Hammonds in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures,
J.Alexander & C.T.Mohanty (eds);
Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
6. Affect and empathy: ethical readings
Primary Text: (required reading)
Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms At Night
Secondary texts:
Donna McCormack, Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (esp.,
chapter on Cereus)
‘Shani Mootoo: Writing Difference and the Caribbean’, special issue of Journal of West
Indian Literature, Vol 19, No 2, April 2011; eds, D.deCaires Narain, Alison Donnell and
Evelyn O’Callaghan;
The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry;
‘Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation’, Clare Hemmings in
Feminist Theory, Vol 13, No 2, pp.147-161, 2012.
7. READING WEEK
8. Torture, trauma and memory
Primary Texts: (required reading)
Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker,
Thomas Glave, ‘The Torturer’s Wife’(file available on SyD)
Secondary texts:
Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds
Nicole Waller, ‘The Book of the Dead’ in Recharting the Black Atlantic eds Oboe & Scacchi,
Routledge, 2008;
Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth;
Sites of Trauma/States of Terror: Interrogating the Politics of Representation in
Rwanda, South Africa and Iraq
Tutor: John Masterson (Email: J.E.Masterson@sussex.ac.uk)
In these sessions, we will explore a range of texts and genres concerned with the Rwandan
genocide, the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa and the ongoing turbulence in
Iraq respectively. We begin with Philip Gourevitch’s journalistic exploration of the events of
1994 and their aftermath as a way of foregrounding those debates about violence, voyeurism
and ventriloquism that will frame this section. As an American journalist who constructs a
highly personal counterpoint between the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust, what ‘right’
does Gourevitch have to ‘write’ these narratives? Given the 2015 reissue of We Wish to
Inform You … as a Picador Classic, we will interrogate the political and ethical, as well as
literary, questions raised by such a canonising gesture. To what extent might this be seen as
yet another attempt to appropriate ‘postcolonial trauma’ for a predominantly Western
audience? To explore these complex questions further, we will put Gourevitch’s text in
conversation with a short story from the collection Say You’re One of Them. This establishes
the contrapuntal approach that will define this section. We then move onto Antjie Krog’s
celebrated account of the TRC process in South Africa, which we look at alongside a range of
poems to be provided in class. With an awareness of the contextual specificity of events in
Rwanda and South Africa, we will ask what it means to revisit these texts some twenty years
after the events they are dealing with. How, for example, does Krog experiment with form in
an attempt to grapple with the complex and ongoing debates about ‘healing’ and
‘reconciliation’ in a post-Apartheid context where discourses of ‘transition’ carry particular
burdens of significance? To what extent is this kind of witnessing always already a form of
ventriloquism? We end with two texts taking very different approaches to the situation in
post-occupation Iraq. Ben Fountain’s novel centres on the experiences of American military
personnel as they prepare to be redeployed. Marketed as ‘the Catch 22 of the Iraq War’, Billy
Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a satirical take on the hegemonic production and construction
of warfare and suffering by the media, as well as its consumption by an oft-complicit public.
Bearing this in mind, we will explore the extent to which the text itself is part of the very
post-9/11 appropriation of terror and trauma it attacks. We do this by considering Fountain’s
work in relation to Hassin Blasim’s collection of short stories. Described as the first major
literary work about the Iraq war from an Iraqi perspective, The Corpse Exhibition is a
suitably provocative text with which to conclude this section given its preoccupations with
terror, trauma and testimony in relation to often precarious, if urgent modes of witnessing.
9. Violence, Voyeurism and Ventriloquism: Representing the Rwandan Genocide and its
Afterlives
Primary Texts (required reading)
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our
Families: Stories from Rwanda (2000/2015)
‘My Parents’ Bedroom’ from Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them (2008)
Primary Critical Reading
Art and Trauma in Africa: Representations of Reconciliation in Music, Visual Arts,
Literature and Film, eds. Lizelle Bisschoff and Stefanie van der Peer (London and New
York, I.B. Tauris: 2013), introduction.
Norridge, Zoe. Perceiving Pain in African Literature (Basingstoke and New York,
Palgrave MacMillan: 2013), introduction and Chapter 4 ‘Writing around Pain,’ 134-165
Recommended Reading
Erin K. Baines, ‘Body Politics and the Rwandan Crisis’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 24, No.
3 (Jun., 2003), 479-493.
Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3993381
Piotr H. Kosicki, ‘Sites of Aggressor—Victim Memory: The Rwandan Genocide, Theory and
Practice’, International Journal of Sociology, Vol. 37, No. 1, Aggressors, Victims, and Trauma
in Collective Memory (Spring, 2007), 10-29
Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20628282 René Lemarchand, ‘Bearing Witness
to Mass Murder’, African Studies Review, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Dec., 2005), 93-101
Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20065142
Frank Möller, ‘Rwanda Revisualized: Genocide, Photography, and the Era of the Witness’,
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Apr.-June 2010), 113-136
Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40645290
Peter Uvin, ‘Reading the Rwandan Genocide’, International Studies Review, Vol. 3, No. 3
(Autumn, 2001), 75-99
Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3186243
10. The Traumatic Truth of the TRC in South Africa
Primary Texts (required reading)
Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (1999) and selected poetry (to be provided in class)
Primary Critical Reading
Shane Graham, South African Literature After the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss
(New York, Palgrave MacMillan: 2009)
After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, eds. Wilmot
James and Linda van de Vijver (Cape Town, Ohio University Press: 2001)
Mark Sanders. Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth
Commission (Stanford and Johannesburg, Stanford University Press and Wits
University Press: 2007)
Recommended Reading
Carli Coetzee, ‘They Never Wept, the Men of My Race': Antjie Krog's 'Country of My Skull'
and the White South African Signature’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4
(Dec., 2001), 685-696. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/823408
Susan Vanzanten Gallagher, "I Want to Say: / Forgive Me": South African Discourse and
Forgiveness’, PMLA, Vol. 117, No. 2 (Mar., 2002), 303-306
Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/823277
Paul Gready, ‘Novel Truths: Literature and Truth Commissions’, Comparative Literature
Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1, Human Rights and Literary Forms (2009), 156-176
Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25659704
Laura Moss, "Nice Audible Crying": Editions, Testimonies, and "Country of My Skull",
Research in African Literatures, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter, 2006), 85-104. Available online:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3821230
Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, ‘Human Rights, Storytelling, and the Position of the
Beneficiary: Antjie Krog's "Country of My Skull", PMLA, Vol. 121, No. 5 (Oct., 2006),
1577-1584. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25501628
11. The Forever War? The Iraq War and Its Discontents
Primary Texts (required reading)
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2013)
Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq (2014)
Primary Critical Reading
Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin, War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War
(Cambridge, Polity: 2010)
W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press: 2010)
Recommended Reading
Richard Crownshaw, ‘Deterritorializing the "Homeland" in American Studies and American
Fiction after 9/11’, Journal of American Studies, Vol. 45, No. 4, 10 Years After 9/11
(November 2011), 757-776
Liam Kennedy, ‘Soldier photography: visualising the war in Iraq’, Review of International
Studies, Vol. 35, No. 4 (October 2009), 817-833
Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40588076
Roger Luckhurst, ‘In War Times: Fictionalizing Iraq’, Contemporary Literature, Volume 53,
Number 4, Winter 2012, 713-737 Hayder Al-Mohammad, ‘A Kidnapping in Basra: The
Struggles and Precariousness of Life in Postinvasion Iraq’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 27,
No. 4 (NOVEMBER 2012) 597-614
Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Harm's Way: Language and the Contemporary Arts of War’, PMLA, Vol.
124, No. 5, Special Topic: War (Oct., 2009), 1515-1531. Available online:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25614382
Sabine Sielke, ‘Why "9/11 is [not] unique," or: Troping Trauma’ Amerikastudien / American
Studies, Vol. 55, No. 3, Trauma's Continuum—September 11th Reconsidered (2010), 385-408
Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41158508
12. Term Paper: Discussion and Consultation
Tutors: Denise DeCaires Narain, John Masterson, Minoli Salgado
Background Reading (for use throughout the module)
Irene Visser, ‘Trauma Theory and postcolonial literary studies,’ Journal of Postcolonial
Writing, 47:3 (2011), 270-282
Available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.569378
David Lloyd, Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?, Interventions 2:2 (2000) 212-228
Available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/136980100427324
Michael Rothberg, 'Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response', Studies in the Novel, 40:1 and
2 (Spring and Summer 2008) 224-234
Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, eds. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg
and Alexandra Schultheis Moore (New York and Oxon, Routledge: 2012) – particularly the
introduction
Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Richard Gray, After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2011)
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror (New York and London:
Vintage, 2009)
Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)
Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003)
Diddier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the Condition
of Victimhood (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009)
Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)