eBook

Postcolonial narrative and the work of mourning : J.M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison

Durrant, Sam

2004

Overview

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.

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Subject: African Americans in literature / Apartheid in literature / Blacks in literature / Coetzee, J. M., 1940- -- Criticism and interpretation / Grief in literature / Guyana -- In literature / Harris, Wilson -- Criticism and interpretation / LITERARY CRITICISM / Morrison, Toni -- Criticism and interpretation / Narration (Rhetoric) -- History -- 20th century / Postcolonialism in literature / Semiotics & Theory / Slavery in literature / South Africa -- In literature
• ISBN: 0791459462, 9780791459454, 0791459454, 9780791459461