Papers by Rebecca Romdhani
In Narrating Violence in the Postcolonial World, Routledge, 2022
Virgin Islander Tiphanie Yanique’s controversial novel Land of Love and Drowning (2014) initially... more Virgin Islander Tiphanie Yanique’s controversial novel Land of Love and Drowning (2014) initially appears to conflate US colonization with sexual violence, surveillance, and incest. This chapter argues instead that the novel is a work of metafiction, in which the anonymous narrators violate three of Yanique’s female characters. The focus thus shifts away from sexual violence to the way in which this violence is narrated, which the novel calls attention to through repeatedly evoking disgust. Using Pierre Bourdieu concept of symbolic violence, this chapter suggests that these narrators, who call themselves “we old wives,” are in fact the characters Hippolyte and Sheila, whom, as stated in Yanique’s “Author’s Note” to the novel, originate from American writer Herman Wouk’s novel Don’t Stop the Carnival (1965). In this reading of Yanique’s book, Hippolyte and Sheila are writing back to Wouk’s symbolic violence in his representation of the Virgin Islands. However, the narrators’ aspirations fail because they themselves repeat colonial tropes (such as the conflation of a woman’s body with the land) and because they use women’s experiences, whether as victims or as heroines, as plot devices for anticolonial action.
In Narrating Violence in the Postcolonial World, Routledge, 2022
This introduction identifies some of the main features and incarnations of colonial violence, inc... more This introduction identifies some of the main features and incarnations of colonial violence, including some of its physical, psychological, and epistemic avatars, which have mutated through time and space and still find expression in the supposedly postcolonial world. Reading philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s analysis of colonial and decolonial violence in The Wretched of the Earth together with the work of anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom on terror warfare in postcolonial Mozambique, this chapter argues that it is important to move away from conceptualizing violence as thing-like but rather understand it as residing in the body and forming a fluid cultural construct. The chapter then focuses on the ethical implications of theorizing and narrating violence, both of which involve the risk of perpetuating this violence. Finally, the introduction suggests that understanding how violence is narrated in postcolonial fiction, drama, and film requires a combination of conceptual knowledge, awareness of historical and social context, and close textual analysis. The chapter ends with an outline of the book, which is divided into three sections: “Intimate and Gender Violence,” “Violence and War,” and “Violence on the Move.”
In Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970–2020. Eds. Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell. Cambridge University Press, 2020
While the naming of Caribbean works as speculative fiction has enabled the possibility of this re... more While the naming of Caribbean works as speculative fiction has enabled the possibility of this regionally specific genre to take shape in the twenty-first century, there has been a long tradition of literary works that seek to represent alternative and multiple realities by fragmenting realist forms and employing the rich folkloric and spiritual traditions of the region. Figures such as the soucouyant and mermaid often symbolize gendered realities, the zombie represents psychological trauma, and spirits emphasize the continuation of the past in the present. Drawing on elements of fantasy, these works are thus often deeply informed by socio-political concerns and traumatic events, and arguably transform, rather than bypass, the historic character of Caribbean literature. Through the utopian/dystopian scenarios recognizable within speculative literature, readers are returned to the issues of memory, history and identity, while also pushing at the imaginative limits of community and embodiment in their creation of alternate possibilities.
In Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge. Eds. B Ledent, Evelyn O'Callaghan, and D. Tunca. Palgrave, 2018
In this interview Kei Miller explains how madness in Jamaica differs from madness in England and ... more In this interview Kei Miller explains how madness in Jamaica differs from madness in England and how the figure of the “mad” person in Caribbean literature is usually depicted. He also reveals his motivations for portraying and giving interiority to such persons, including the Rastaman in The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014) and Adamine in The Last Warner Woman (2010). In the second part of the interview Miller talks at length about the connection between madness and diaspora. He argues that the immigrant, like the colonizer, tries to change the new landscape
In Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge. Eds. B Ledent, Evelyn O'Callaghan, and D. Tunca. Palgrave, 2018
Through locating the instances of unreliable narration and scrutinizing the mode and performative... more Through locating the instances of unreliable narration and scrutinizing the mode and performative nature of the narrator’s account in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), this chapter argues that the novel exposes the pathology of colonialism. More precisely, by reading the novel alongside David Scott’s description of what would constitute a moral and reparative history, and Kehinde Andrews’s work on the psychosis of whiteness, the essay suggests that Kincaid’s text constructs the history that Scott advocates and reveals the psychology that allows the legacy of slavery and colonialism to continue.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2018
In his blog posts and Facebook notes, Jamaican author Kei Miller writes about his experiences in ... more In his blog posts and Facebook notes, Jamaican author Kei Miller writes about his experiences in Glasgow and the US, emphasizing the different “realities” and notions of “reality” coexisting in these places. More specifically, Miller’s writings call attention to the hierarchies operating to elevate some “realities” and silence others. This article argues that Miller’s pieces can be regarded as a hybrid of two minor genres, the blog and the essay, as well as of the subgenre of creative non-fiction. This hybridity mirrors and illuminates some of the themes explored in the writings, such as authenticity, authority, subjectivity and voice. When Miller’s online posts are read alongside his essays – and precisely because they are in a virtual space that allows for contributions from his readers in the comment section – they help to expose the hierarchies that he writes about, and demonstrate the urgency of giving voice to marginalized realities.
Nothing's Mat is Erna Brodber's latest offering in a body of work whose trajectory probes and hea... more Nothing's Mat is Erna Brodber's latest offering in a body of work whose trajectory probes and heals the psychosocial and emotional legacy of slavery and colonialism. The scope of this new short novel is dazzling; it not only includes many of the themes of Brodber's earlier fiction and nonfiction but also expands her focus to the Jamaican diaspora and to European and African indentureship. Like her previous novels, the structure on first reading is tricky, as it moves about in time, facilitates a multivocal narration, and includes many magical and spiritual elements. The text follows the quest of British-born Princess to construct her family tree. She takes up this endeavor twice in her life, and both are woven together in the novel. Her journey begins when she is seventeen and, to research her A-level project, visits her father's relative, Cousin Nothing, in Jamaica. From Cousin Nothing, Princess records stories about her extended family. One of the main themes in this section, as is the case in Brodber's earlier novel Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), is the consequences of female sexuality being taboo. This section is also reminiscent of many of the testimonies by working-class Jamaican women in the Sistren Theatre Collective's Lionheart Gal (1986). In Nothing's Mat, Maud is the guardian, nonbiological mother, and sister of the character Clarise. Maud fails to inform Clarise about sex, owing to the subject being taboo and because Maud herself was raped. Clarise's naiveté exposes her to abuse from an older man and she becomes pregnant; Clarise's ignorance also means that she is unaware that she is pregnant until she gives birth to Nothing.
Caribbean-Canadian Nalo Hopkinson's speculative fiction novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) is se... more Caribbean-Canadian Nalo Hopkinson's speculative fiction novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) is set in a near future dystopian Toronto and contains many African and Caribbean supernatural and folkloric characters. This article focuses on the zombie, which traditionally functions as a symbol of powerlessness, and argues that Hopkinson's book expands the relations of power that this figure is commonly employed to probe. More specifically, the essay suggests that, in Brown Girl in the Ring, the zombie symbolizes black people's history of oppression, exploitation, and demonization. Furthermore, through reading the novel alongside emotion discourse and Vodou psychology, the article contends that the zombie in Hopkinson's book can be understood as being symbolic of the consequential shame that members of the African-Caribbean diaspora may experience from a legacy of oppression, which, significantly, includes internalizing a white Western perception of their African and Caribbean cultural inheritance.
Talks by Rebecca Romdhani
Uploads
Papers by Rebecca Romdhani
Talks by Rebecca Romdhani
Introduction: Locating the Mutations of Colonial Violence in the Postcolonial World
Rebecca Romdhani and Daria Tunca
Section 1: Intimate and Gender Violence
1 Ethics, Representation, and the Spectacle of Violence in Marlon James’s Short Fiction and the August Town Fiction of Kei Miller
Suzanne Scafe
2 Narrating Jamaican and Cypriot Colonial Legacies: Postcolonial Pathologies of Violence in Alecia McKenzie’s "Satellite City" and Nora Nadjarian’s "Okay, Daisy, Finish"
Petra Tournay–Theodotou
3 Unscrambling the "Grammar of Violence": Sexual Assault and Emotional Vulnerability in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
Daria Tunca
4 Violating Virgins: Symbolic Violence in Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning
Rebecca Romdhani
Section 2: Violence and War
5 Reading Testimony: Congolese Civil War and the Trauma of Rape in Dramatic Performances and Fiction
Véronique Bragard
6 An Uneasy Alliance: War, Violence, and Masculinity in Contemporary Sri Lankan Theatre
Neluka Silva
7 Cinematic Representations of South African Gang Violence: Enclosed Spaces and Turf Wars
Riaan Oppelt
Section 3: Violence on the Move
8 Abjected Bodies: The Bogus Woman and British New Slaveries in the Context of Postcolonial Studies
Pietro Deandrea
9 Violence, Trauma, and the Question of Redemption in Postcolonial Zimbabwe: Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory
Laura Beck
10 Of Systemic Violence, Addressivity, and "the Oil Encounter": Representing the Gulf’s Indian Diaspora in Benyamin’s Goat Days
Delphine Munos
11 Environmental Violence in Australia: The Effects of Mining and Its Representation in the Indigenous Australian Film Satellite Boy
Victoria Herche
Keynotes:
Pamela L. Caughie (Loyola University Chicago, USA)
Lipika Pelham (author, documentary filmmaker, and journalist)
Suzanne Scafe (University of Brighton, UK)
Conference website:
https://www.cerep.uliege.be/cms/c_7609707/en/the-dynamics-of-postcolonial-passings-comparisons-and-intersections