Katherine Isobel Baxter

Reading new black fiction of East Asia: An ex-centric approach to transnational literary studies

Responding to critiques of the status quo in transnational literary studies, this essay models an alternative approach, particularly for the field of African–Asian studies. The transnational turn in literary studies has often been less global than we might desire: postcolonial texts are frequently read in terms of predetermined features or ideologies, and comparative studies often posit the USA as their locus for comparison. Following Ato Quayson’s call for attention to the “ex-centric” in postcolonial and transnational literature, this essay demonstrates how the figures of gui and Eshu emerge as interpretative keys in two recent African–Asian works, by Ken Kamoche and Biyi Bandele. The essay argues that these figures point up the complexities inherent in transnational relations, which the texts explore. The essay invites us to read with greater alertness to the “ex-centric” in transnational texts in order to unpack their full implications.

Speaking Foreign: Conrad and Modernist Multilingualism

Conrads literary polyglossia has received surprisingly scant attention. Where it has, for example, in Sylvère Monods “Joseph Conrads Polyglot Wordplay,” discussion tends to focus on Conrads own linguistic facility. More generally, his literary multilingualism is read as one trope among many, such as palimpsest, unreliable narration, and intertextuality, which contribute to a larger modernist aesthetic of multivocality. Lord Jim and “The Waste Land” might be seen to typify this model. In this essay, however, it is argued that Modernisms multilingual voices often also indicate rather more precise issues in the cross-cultural communication networks of the period. Drawing on the political paradigms of Derridas Monolingualism of the Other (1998), I demonstrate how Modernists used multilingualism to construct and to challenge national and regional identification. Restored to this context, Conrads fiction can be seen to mobilize multilingual characters as a way of exposing the limits of nationalist ideals and identities. In resituating Conrads own uses of multilingualism, particularly in Under Western Eyes and Nostromo, this essay argues that his relatively discreet use of foreign language in these two political novels follows a broader contemporary literary discourse in which multilingualism is used to more than aesthetic and realist ends.

‘Senseless speech’ and inaudibility in Conrad's ‘Amy Foster’: rethinking trauma and the unspeakable in fiction

ABSTRACT This essay revisits the significance of the trope of the unspeakable in representations of trauma in order to put pressure on traditional readings of the unspeakable in literary trauma theory. Taking Joseph Conrads short story, ‘Amy Foster’, as an illustrative example, I demonstrate how, in certain circumstances, trauma is not rendered unspeakable because reflection on it is impossible, but rather trauma is caused by the failure and/or frustration of speech itself. Furthermore, I draw upon Derridas Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, to parse out the implications of silence, language and the inaudible in texts, such as ‘Amy Foster’, that fail to conform to the usual expectations of the unspeakable in trauma literature. Narratives such as this challenge our standard paradigms in literary trauma theory. Building on Rancières critique of sublime aesthetics, in The Future of the Image, I argue that we need to broaden the categories by which we read the relationship between trauma and the unspeakable in literature, and in doing so be prepared to find trauma in unexpected places.