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

by Sam Durrant, Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee

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.

152 pages, Hardcover

First published December 11, 2003

Reviews

[غبار · Rating 4 out of 5]

"... what the trajectory of the narrative itself teaches us: that an inability to metaphorize indicates an inability to come to terms with absence and loss, that in order to come to terms with their slave-pasts, the characters must learn to (re)metaphorize their bodies. In order to distance themselves from a history of objectification, they need to conceive of themselves as something more than “flesh.” If slavery reduced their sexuality to the bodily fact of biological difference, in order to become sexed subjects they need to move beyond this crude essentialization of their sexuality and reopen the question of what it means to be a man or a woman in symbolic or sociocultural terms."

—Keeping It in the Family, p92

[Manuel Abreu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good. Slightly deterministic. I guess I just don't read novels this way. Good tho! Read it

[Hemani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapter 3 on the racial sublime and racial identity as a marker of that which we are unable to remember and reclaim is exquisite! Chapter 1 is a provocative meditation on the limits of reconciliation.

If you are a student or scholar of raceology, you must read this.