Abstract
In the Introduction to his Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning, Sam Durrant makes a powerful case for the salience of trauma to the study of colonialism. Durrant asks us to attend anew to the moment in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks when a child points at the author and says, “‘Dirty Nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’” This textual moment, he argues, “memorializes a traumatic event” that
interpolates Fanon not as an individual but as a member of a race … apart, other, nonhuman. The experiences of racism that he [Fanon] goes on to recount do not add up to a narrative precisely because they cannot be integrated into a life history; they are repetitions of an “originary” event that bars him from having a life history and from the temporality of the human. (2004: 14)
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© 2014 Greg Forter
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Forter, G. (2014). Colonial Trauma, Utopian Carnality, Modernist Form: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In: Balaev, M. (eds) Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137365941_4
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