Overview

Fictional writing has an important mnemonic function for the Afro-Carib-bean community. It facilitates an encounter between contemporary societies and their historical origins. The representation of diasporic trauma in the novels of Fred D’Aguiar, John Hearne, and Caryl Phillips challenges territorial under¬standings of nationality and raises awareness of the eurocentric basis of Western historiography. Slavery is a recurring motif of the nine novels analysed in this study. They narrate the fates of silenced victims who all share the traumatic experience of racial violence even if otherwise separated through time, space, gender and age. These charismatic fictional characters facilitate an empathic access to the history of slavery that goes beyond the anonymity of traditional historical sources. Their most private and intimate sorrows make the traumatic conditions of slavery appear much less remote and reveal their suffering. The euphemistic and distorting selection of the events that has been passed down by the dominant culture is thus countered by a relentless display of historical violence. These literary images establish an important symbolic repertoire and introduce powerful founding myths of the diaspora. In spite of the traumatic foundations of the community, the nine novels display considerable optimism about the possibility of a convivial future that transcends racial boundaries.The capacity and willingness to improvise and adapt to new environments and to do so even in face of a traumatic heritage can be regarded as the most important precondition for positive future developments within the matrix of a rapidly transforming global environment.

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""What Boutros is very clear about [...] is the role of literature, and more specifically the neo-slave narrative that “facilitates empathic access to the history of slavery that can help us get beyond the facelessness of public statistics” (123). As he reminds us, “diaspora cannot access African space in any unmediated way. The community depends on discursive representations of Africa [and] literature has a crucial function in this process” (26)."" - Jocelyn Martin (Ateneo de Manila University), Recherche littéraire, literary research 34, Summer 2018.

What Boutros is very clear about [...] is the role of literature, and more specifically the neo-slave narrative that facilitates empathic access to the history of slavery that can help us get beyond the facelessness of public statistics (123). As he reminds us, diaspora cannot access African space in any unmediated way. The community depends on discursive representations of Africa [and] literature has a crucial function in this process (26). - Jocelyn Martin (Ateneo de Manila University), Recherche litteraire, literary research 34, Summer 2018.

Author Information

Fatim Boutros is an independent scholar focusing on diaspora studies, trauma studies, and visual cultures. After various positions as lecturer at the Universities of Erlangen and Bamberg, he became a research fellow of a Research Training Group funded by the German Research Foundation. His current postdoctoral project on jazz photography in the 1930s and 40s was initiated during a John W. Kluge Center Fellowship at the Library of Congress which was funded by the Bavarian American Academy.

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