Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing
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Overview
Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is a critical study of the relationship between bodies, memories and communal witnessing. With a focus on the aesthetics and politics of queer postcolonial narratives, this book examines how unspeakable traumas of colonial and familial violence are communicated through the body. Exploring multisensory epistemologies as queer and anti-colonial acts of resistance, McCormack offers an original engagement with collective and public forms of bearing witness that may emerge in response to institutionalized violence. Intergenerational, communal and fragmented narratives are central to this analysis of ethics, witnessing, and embodied memories.
Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is the first text to offer a sustained analysis of Judith Butler’s and Homi Bhabha’s intersecting theories of performativity, and to draw out the centrality of witnessing to the performative structure of power. It moves through queer, postcolonial, disability and trauma studies to explore how the repetition of familial violence – throughout multiple generations –may be lessened through an embodied witnessing that is simultaneously painful, disturbing and filled with pleasure. Its focus is selected literary texts by Shani Mootoo, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Ann-Marie MacDonald, and it situates this literary analysis in the colonial histories of Trinidad, Morocco and Canada.
Critiques Judith Butler’s and Homi Bhaba’s theories of performativity by showing how non-institutionalised forms of witnessing serve to reconfigure theories of literary performance
Critical engagement with Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha’s influential queer and postcolonial theories
Shows how geographically disparate texts interact in their postcolonial and queer re-imaginings of belonging.
Develops theories of performativity and ethics through the notion of witnessing
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Embodied Memories
Queer Postcolonial Narratives, or A Note on Methodology
Performative Listening
Historicizing Witnessing
Queer Postcolonial Structure
Chapter One: Intergenerational Witnessing in Cereus Blooms at Night
Unknowing Pain
Historicizing Responsibility
Embodied Survival
Intergenerational Witnessing
Chapter Two: Monstrous Witnessing in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable
Embodied Stories
Linguistic Touching
Monstrous Encounters
Tactile Correspondence
Embodied Allegories
Performative Pain
Coda: 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 Family
Witnessing Photographs
Painting Memories
Memories as Storytelling
Intergenerational Fossils
Conclusion: Silent Bodies, or Speaking with the Body
Decolonizing Normativity
Visceral Storytelling, or Multisensory Epistemologies
Performative Endings
Embodied Encounters
Bibliography
Index
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 even
more promiscuous possibilities for critical intersections while also critiquing the limits and blind spots of some approaches.
Richly provocative and showing an extraordinary depth of scholarship, Donna McCormack’s new book is an enticing text whichever way you approach it. She skilfully brings together a queering of postcolonial literature and morphological uncertainty to uncover the complex entanglements of flesh and national histories. What is demanded of the reader as embodied witness is a matter of high responsibility: an ethics of risk, as much engaged with the silent/silenced subject as with those who speak.
- Title: Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing
- Author: Donna McCormack
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2014
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 224
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781441113788, 9781501310898, 1501310895, 1441113789
- Resource ID: LLS:9781441113788
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T14:57:44Z
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.