Abstract

This dissertation aims to address literary texts written in English by diasporic writers of African descent in the context of trauma. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concept of “traumatic realism,” it seeks to question the Eurocentrism that marks cultural trauma studies and bring into focus the anxieties of home and (un)belonging as indicators of post-traumatic African cultures. The three analyzed works by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Caryl Phillips are placed at the crossroads of cultures, beyond the victim/perpetrator dichotomy, in order to construct new cartographies that question the history of colonial modernity. The spatiotemporal intricacies of postmemory in the texts problematize the “realism” of nationalist narratives and question the prefix “post” in “post-colonial” that claims a “working through” the ills of the past. Confronted with the detritus of the “real,” the African diaspora seeks to provide an ethical understanding of the past as it lays bare the far-reaching aftereffects of colonial and slave-holding enterprises on the daily lives of the displaced Africans. In “traumatic realist” terms, the writers negotiate the politics of space and race as they are constantly implicated as postgenerations of colonialism and slavery, while engaging contemporary readers ethically in the repercussions of a painful past. Several studies have addressed displacement as a traumatic aftereffect of colonialism and slavery. Yet, “traumatic realism” and its exploration of the overarching notion of “the implicated subject” by writers of African descent has not been given enough consideration. This dissertation follows a chronotopic (Bakhtin) line of investigation that realigns the dichotomous past and present, or the extreme and the everyday, as it draws on the intricacies of postmemory that bring forth the “lived” manifestations of the colonial discourse. Central to this study is the way in which the structures of nation-states, especially in Africa and/or Britain, continue to foster the forces of forgetting and separation that blight the realities of the displaced African subjects. Today, we bear witness to the growing numbers of refugees, exiles, and immigrants, particularly African ones, who are confronted with oppression, genocide, and racism between the structures of the nation-states in Africa and Europe. This context stresses the need to address pressing questions that highlight what Michael Rothberg refers to as “historical responsibility which engages other subjects, be they descendants or non-descendants of colonial violence, to bear responsible witness to the lasting aftereffects of the colonial and slaveholding pasts. The critical double bind of their representation of the past brings two issues to the fore: Although they need to provide a particularized documentation of the past, the writers resort to a non-competitive model that locates the violence inflicted on the displaced Africans side by side with those suffering from other forms of violence centered in the West. Keywords: African literature, trauma, realism, memory, diaspora, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Caryl Phillips