Ato Quayson - "Self-Writing and Alienation in the Postcolonial Novel” - October 10, 4pm

[Jay Dolmage]

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to remind you of next week's exciting lecture sponsored by the Department of English:

Wednesday,October 10th, 4:00 PM, RCH 305

Ato Quayson, University of Toronto

"Self-Writing and Alienation in the Postcolonial Novel”

Here is an overview of the talk:

Despite the remarkable range of literary representations of tragic characters, themes and situations in postcolonial literature, there have been very few attempts at exploring the postcolonial novel with respect to tragedy.  Apart from occasional essays by Timothy Reiss in Against Autonomy (2002) and David Scott in Conscripts of Modernity (2004) there has been no sustained and systematic attempt at assessing the concept of tragedy and how it might be applied to postcolonial writing.
Through a superb reading of CLR James’s interpretation of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s crisis in The Black Jacobins (1938), Scott points out the impossible bind of modernity that made people such as James and L’Ouverture before him compromised by their attraction to an Enlightenment project that they needed to somehow disavow to enable them properly pursue the cause of freedom.  It would not be hyperbolic to suggest that every foundational text of postcolonial literary studies exemplifies such a tragic sense, even if articulated differently: Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman are only a few that come readily to mind, while every novel by J.M. Coetzee serves to illustrate the point in subtle ways.
All of these texts may be read in relation to the problematic of Enlightenment self-writing and the question of alienation.  Starting from the premise that colonialism, decolonization and their aftermath produced a distortion of the instruments of self-writing, this lecture will argue that it is impossibility of narrating a coherent account of the self that produces firstly the burdens of alienation, and secondly the sense of tragedy that is discernible everywhere in postcolonial writing.

This talk will kick-off the 2012/2013 English Language and Literature Departmental Lecture Series: "Affective Environments”

Future Events:

Thursday, November 8th, 4:00 PM, HH 373
Elizabeth Harvey, University of Toronto
“Shakespeare's Spirit World”

Thursday, November 22nd, 4:00 PM, HH 180
Jacob Zimmer, Small Wooden Shoe Theatre
Company
“Locality, Laughter, Theatre”
Co-sponsored by the University of Waterloo Department of Drama

Thursday, February 28th, 4:00 PM, HH 373
Wayde Compton, Emily Carr University
“Vancouver Versus Hogan's Alley: Urban Renewal, Negro Removal, and the Myth of Livability”

Thursday, March 7th, 4:00 PM, HH 334
Katherine McKittrick, Queen’s University
“Axis Bold as Love:  On Scientia, Sylvia Wynter,
Jimi Hendrix, and Blackness”


Jay
--
Jay Dolmage, Ph.D
Editor, Canadian Journal of Disability Studies
Assistant Professor of English
University of Waterloo
Department of English
Hagey Hall of Humanities Building
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Tel: 519 888 4567 x31035
Fax: 519 746 5788
dolmage at uwaterloo.ca
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