Jay Rajiva

In this essay, I argue that Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, in short stories from her most recent collection, Everything Inside (2019), challenges toxic forms of representation by attending to the imaginative potential of Haitian migrant experience within moments of collective trauma. This challenge, I suggest, is based on bigidi, a Creole expression denoting permanent imbalance that is once philosophy, dance practice, musical aesthetic, and cultural tradition. The principle of being off-balance without falling, central to how bigidi finds expression in Guadeloupean swaré-lé-woz and other forms of Caribbean dance, interweaves rhythm, music, and bodily movement with a community-oriented site of cultural expression. By saturating the narrative and readerly spaces of Everything Inside with uniquely Caribbean elements of improvisation, audience interaction, and performance, Danticat foregrounds moments of shared intimacy and vulnerability between Haitians, disrupting the representational trauma circuit of migrant death.

I argue that both Rita Felski’s postcritical model (as articulated in The Limits of Critique) and its academic reception are made possible only by ignoring or erasing African-American and Afro-Caribbean modes of engagement with art that predate and complicate the critical-postcritical binary. To counteract the vanguardism of this trend in literary studies, I pair Caribbean philosopher-poet Edouard Glissant’s meditation on the origins of Creole speech as an indirect language of “detour” with Nathaniel Mackey’s theorizing of black art as “paracritical”—a mode that assimilates performance and critique, language and metalanguage, and that sits adjacent to (and not against or behind) traditionally academic discourses of engaging with literature. If Glissant provides the cultural and philosophical frame for an Afro-Caribbean way of reading literature, Mackey supplies the artistic metaphor par excellence of the paracritical hinge, voiced in the idioms of jazz and blues. Finally, I examine how Glissant and Mackey’s ideas find formal and aesthetic expression in Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand’s 2005 novel What We All Long For, paying attention to the reader response engendered by the adjacencies of violence, empowerment, possibility, and desire in the novel. In order to analyze What We All Long For, we must promote the liveliness and vivacity of the reading experience and put the text under ethical scrutiny, evincing the paracritical faculty that Afro-Caribbean art demands: commingling the twin pleasures of reading and interpretation, establishing a counter-hegemonic model of literary engagement that implicates the reader without stripping away reading’s pleasure.

This article parts ways both with conventional application of trauma theory to J.M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg and with critical evaluations that focus primarily on metafiction and allegory. Instead, I argue that Dostoevsky's attempts to mourn Pavel involve a sustained meditation on the traumatized mind examining the conditions of its own trauma, figured in a character suffering from unexpected fits of epilepsy (as the real-life Dostoevsky did). First, I demonstrate how working through trauma in literary studies is predicated on psychoanalytic precepts of active focus and temporal unity. I then read the topic of unconsciousness through Jean-Luc Nancy's theorization of sleep as a passive “endomorphosis” that suggests the approach of transformation without actualizing that transformation. Finally, I argue that by focusing on Dostoevsky's imminent loss of consciousness, The Master of Petersburg compels the reader to inhabit what Dominick LaCapra describes as an intermediary zone between acting out and working through trauma, a zone characterized by the productive dispersal of readerly focus. In so doing, The Master of Petersburg offers a critique of institutional and political modes of reconciliation that, in post-apartheid South Africa, tend to substitute the expediency of institutional justice for the complexity of lived traumatic experience.

This article positions agency as a necessarily lacunal aspect of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. By allowing the theatricality of doubling and metaphor to overdetermine Mustafa’s narrative, the novel implicitly challenges both the substitution of symbol for material experience and the rational logic of causation. The disruptive potential of this challenge suggests an emergent form of postcolonial experience – an unpredictable interaction of parts that redefines the whole, in which the centrality of non-human matter’s role in shaping human subjectivity resists and exceeds the analytic frameworks of biological determinism and humanist agency. The article employs Jeffrey Goldstein and Peter Corning’s work on the theory of downward causation, bringing postcolonial literature into dialog with the concept of emergence in the field of biological science. In this way, the article aligns the development of an alternative mode of scientific inquiry with the development of postcolonial theory, both of which are invested in challenging teleological master narratives of ordered, rational progress.