Insurgent Testimonies: Witnessing Colonial Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature

Nicole M. Rizzuto

Open Access Published by Fordham University Press 2015

Insurgent Testimonies

Witnessing Colonial Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature

Nicole M. Rizzuto

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823267842

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book examines testimony in the works of Rebecca West, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, H.G. de Lisser, V.S Reid, and Ngũgi wa Thiong’o, and argues that disruptions to imperial and national power and the legal and legal responses they inspired shape the formal practices of modernist and Anglophone literature.

Author / Editor information

Rizzuto Nicole M. :

Nicole M. Rizzuto is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University.

Reviews

—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:
Insurgent Testimonies wrenches Modernism out of its fixed description as an offshoot of the 'World' wars in their European definition. It wrenches postcolonial theory from its current focus on migration and deterritorialization. It redoes our thinking on testimony. Stunning readings of non-canonical texts by canonical authors, and significant texts away from the mainstream. Attention to historical detail combined with creative command of theory. An indispensable book.

—Jed Esty:
A brilliant, committed reading of literary form as testimonial force produced by the historical damage of colonial violence and by the utopian horizons of anti-imperial insurgency. Rizzuto rescues the unstable mode of confessional writing from its associations with romantic self-expression and contemporary therapy culture, and even from the desire for moral clarity that we associate with commissions of truth, reconciliation, and reparation. Methodologically agile and interpretively nuanced, this book gives us a new geopolitics of intimate literary forms, redraws the map of twentieth-century periodization, and vindicates close reading as a vital tool for humanities research today.

—Ben Baer:
“Insurgent Testimonies is a tremendously engaging, exciting, and innovative book. It is a timely intervention into postcolonial, trauma, and modernist literary studies that brings them together in unprecedented ways, while never glossing over the disciplinary and epistemological tensions between them. Rizzuto's dazzling readings of Conrad, West, de Lisser, Reid, and Ngugi are exemplary.”

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION. Challenging Ruptures Testimonial Insurgencies, Spectral Witnesses Open Access Download PDF	1
ONE. Compelled Confessions and Forced Attachments in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and “Poland Revisited” Open Access Download PDF	35
TWO. Traumas of Nation and Narrative: Legal and Literary Witnessing in Rebecca West’s Wartime Writings Open Access Download PDF	74
THREE. Vindicating the Law H. G. de Lisser, V. S. Reid, and the Morant Bay Rebellion Open Access Download PDF	127
FOUR. Testimony and the Crisis of the Juridical Order in Ngu˜gi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat Open Access Download PDF	178
NOTES Open Access Download PDF	223
INDEX Open Access Download PDF	267

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Pages
- Main content: 288
Keywords: Literary Studies; Postcolonial Studies

eBook

Published: December 1, 2015
ISBN: 9780823267842