Sonya Andermahr

The splintered glass: facets of trauma in the post-colony and beyond

he was stationed in such places as the Frontier Province and Balochistan. The stories take place over several decades and are linked by Tor Baz, who in the first story is born to adulterous lovers fleeing the vengeance of their tribe, and who, much older, in the concluding story tricks a dealer in women into selling one inexpensively by claiming that he wishes to marry her. As examples of the motifs and ironies that recur throughout the volume, the mother who gave birth to Tor Baz and the woman he purchases have both run away from their husbands. Tor Baz, whose parents were killed when he was 5 years old, is left without a home in a region where everyone is first identified and lives by the customs of their tribe. His wanderings (like a falcon) enable Ahmad to show the different traditions of a region where others assume that everyone is a Pashtun and that tribes are alike. Ahmad, as narrator, in places can seem like a voice-over in an ethnographical film pointing to contexts, themes and details, but the writing is usually selective and understated, allowing for alternative, ironic interpretations of events. When the avenging husband in the first story kills the woman’s father for questioning his manhood, the tribesmen simply disperse, leaving this reader wondering about their immutable sense of honour and custom. In the next story a group of rebellious tribesmen, who revolt against the government for imposing a leader on another tribe, are tricked into surrendering through an offer to discuss their grievance. Unlistened to, they are imprisoned and executed. Unlettered and unable to read, they did not realize that the leaflets calling for talks were unsigned and had no legal standing. A similar naivety can be found in the third story where a woman foolishly claims that having a copy of the Koran on her head will protect her against bullets. These stories, set in the borderlands between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, show traditions, such as seasonal migration for the grazing of animals, in conflict with nations trying to enforce their borders and identity. While Ahmad portrays pastoral life as having dignity and honour, he also shows people unable to adjust to new circumstances. Sympathy for their customs is undermined by their treating women worse than animals.

‘Compulsively Readable and Deeply Moving’: Women’s Middlebrow Trauma Fiction

Since the huge rise in interest in the ‘trauma novel’ from the late 1980s onwards, literary trauma studies have provided a detailed account of the ways in which traumas of various kinds have been represented in literature. The majority of these accounts have focused on highly literary fiction and have emphasised both the fundamental unrepresentability of trauma and its deforming effect on narrative. However, it is also the case that there has been a veritable outpouring of trauma texts in the popular arena of mass market and middlebrow fiction. Within contemporary women’s writing, for example, novels about forms of grief as a response to trauma seem to abound. In particular, I have noticed a proliferation of narratives in which women characters come to terms, or fail to, with the traumatic loss of children. Significantly, this preoccupation with the representation of maternal bereavement seems to obtain across generic boundaries within women’s writing as a whole. For example, recent narratives of maternal loss have taken the form of the Gothic novel, like Julie Myerson’s The Story of You (2007); the crime thriller (Louise Doughty’s Whatever You Love (2010) and Julie Myerson’s Something Might Happen (2004)); and the domestic melodrama, such as Kim Edwards’s The Memory Keeper’s Daughter (2007). Taken together, these novels could be seen as forming another emerging literary genre — women’s trauma fiction.

Hooked on Classics: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 25 Years On

Given that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is one of the more recently published texts discussed in this volume and having just published a book on Winter son’s works myself, it felt slightly odd being asked by the editors to ‘revisit’ it as a ‘classic’ text. Still, it was 29 years ago that Winterson’s debut novel was published, which is older than the average undergraduate student. Moreover, the literary scene was a very different place in 1985, so there must be a good case for reassessment of the text in 2014. The editors’ aim in this volume is to provide ‘new and original interpretations of texts which have established themselves as twentieth century classics’. The main problem this poses the contemporary critic is that the novel has always been seen by commentators as ineluctably ‘new’: novel, innovative, experimental, postmodern, as hybridizing forms, challenging boundaries and deconstructing discourses. Its publication coincided with the consolidation of critical theory in academic departments of English and so critical readings of it have always seen it in terms of — and in many ways as an exemplar of — the new (post- structuralist) theories. As a newly minted ‘classic’ text, one which entered the canon almost immediately upon publication, Oranges was hailed as a postmodern text, and Winterson as an exemplary feminist and queer literary practitioner (Morrison) from the very beginning. The novel has been analysed variously as a female and lesbian Bildungsroman (Onega, Andermahr), as a feminist appropriation of the fantastic (Armitt), as an example of the lesbian postmodern (Doan), as biblical reworking (Cosslett), as quest narrative (Onega, Pykett), and as working class text (O’Rourke).

Postcolonial witnessing: trauma out of bounds

themes, each of which is treated in a different chapter. So we have sections on contact, possession, rebellion, resistance, culture and collapse. In the chapter on conquest we learn about the significance of technology to British success, the role of the empire’s navy, the impact of military discipline, and the part that indigenous contingents played in the British success story. It is no surprise to see why India played such a significant role in the story of empire and how, once it became independent, the rest of the empire quickly came unstuck. Each of Darwin’s chapters is supported by half a dozen or so case studies. The text is augmented by a number of clear and useful maps. In the course of this epic narrative it is perhaps not surprising that no singular rationale or theory can explain precisely how and why the British were successful. Darwin argues instead that the empire was “improvised”, “unstable”, “higgledy-piggledy”, “a ragbag” and “a work in progress”. A number of intriguing themes thus emerge, in particular the centrality of luck. It seems that the British Empire arose just at the right time, when Ottoman, Mughal and Chinese power were on the wane (a theme addressed in Darwin’s earlier work After Tamerlane), when major reserves of gold and coal could be exploited and when no European power, post-Napoleon, was really in a position to jeopardize British ascendency. Unfinished Empire is thus also peppered with expressions such as: “fortuitous”, “unique”, “lucky”, “fortunate” and “against the odds”. Even during the Falklands crisis, when Britain’s imperial luck had begun to run out, these British possessions just happened to be on the edge of Argentinian air-power. Indeed, if Australia is the “lucky country”, after reading Unfinished Empire it appears that its British imperial counterpart is “the lucky empire”. Two other important themes emerge from the pages of Darwin’s story. The first is the significance of 1815 as a turning point in the development of British power and history. The other, which in the last few years has become more and more conspicuous, is the role that private initiative played in the construction of empire. Indeed, Darwin argues that the British Empire was “largely a private enterprise”, albeit one aided and abetted by the state. Witness the power and influence of the ubiquitous East India Company, as well as smaller and earlier schemes, ranging from Roanoke to the Royal African Company. I have only one minor criticism of the book, namely that, apart from the white settlement colonies of Australia and New Zealand, the South Pacific does not get much mention.

Gender and the Student Experience: Teaching Feminist Writing in the Post-Feminist Classroom

This chapter examines student perceptions of gender, and feminism in particular, in the context of English Studies in Higher Education.1 Based on my experience of teaching a third-year option in ‘Feminist Fiction’ at the University of Northampton since 2000, it uses the results of a long-term study of student perceptions of the module to assess students’ relationship to feminist texts and their attitudes to gender as a category of literary and cultural analysis in the classroom. The questionnaire asked students what they understood by the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist text’; about the relevance of feminism today; and about the relative significance of gender as a category of analysis. I was interested to see whether students thought other vectors of social experience such as race, class and sexuality were equally, less or more important than gender.

Sarah Schulman's queer diasporas: People in Trouble and Empathy

This essay considers the usefulness of the concept of ‘queer diaspora’ in relation to the work of US lesbian writer Sarah Schulman. According to Gayatri Gopinath, ‘The concept of a queer diaspora enables a simultaneous critique of heterosexuality and the nation form while exploding the binary opposition between nation and diaspora, heterosexuality, original and copy’ (p. 11). Since her debut novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story, published in 1984, Schulman has mapped contemporary sexual politics, in particular the impact of the AIDS crisis, in the context of American capitalism and imperialism. Writing from the point of view of marginal, ethnic minority, and/or counter-cultural individuals, Schulman both laments the way in which people are abandoned by their families for their sexual choices and celebrates the creativity of peoples survival strategies in the cultural margins. Through a discussion of her works from the early 1990s, People in Trouble and Empathy, this essay explores Schulmans multilayered representation of queer Jewish diasporic experience in New York. Utilizing three models of queer diaspora developed in the 1990s – as a political response to AIDS; as a negotiation of notions of ‘home’; and as a form of cultural mourning – it examines the different ways in which the texts narrativize aspects of queer diaspora. In particular, it argues that Schulmans work explores the specificity of queer female subjects, delineating how lesbians experience is distinct from that of both straight women and gay men. In conclusion, Schulmans exploration of the joy and anguish of queer subjects in the postmodern city demonstrates the subversive possibilities that reside in the spaces of cultural unbelonging.