The idea of "Third Generation Nigerian Literature": Conceptualizing historical change and territorial affiliation in the contemporary Nigerian novel

Recent critical discourse on Nigerian fiction employs historicizing techniques that categorize texts according to generations, each of which is presumed to share formal and political qualities and represent a distinct stage in national literary developme

The Meaning of Settler Realism: (De)Mystifying Frontiers in the Postcolonial Historical Novel

Dominant theorizations of settler colonialism identify it as a social form characterized by a problem with historical narration: because the existence of settler communities depends on the dispossession of indigenous peoples, settlers find themselves trapped by the need both to confront and to disavow these origins. How might this problem affect the aesthetics of the realist novel? This article argues that the historical novels produced in places like Australia and New Zealand constitute a distinctive variant of literary realism inflected by the ideological tensions of settler colonialism. Approaching the novel from the perspective of settler colonialism offers new ways to consider classic theories of realism and, in particular, reframes Georg Lukács\u27s concept of reification—and the critical distinction between realism and naturalism he derived from it—as an unexpectedly useful tool for analyzing postcolonial literatures. Doing so, however, requires us to jettison Lukács\u27s progressive historicism in favor of a model of literary history shaped by uneven temporalities and a fundamental disjunction between the historical perspectives of settler and nonsettler communities—thus complicating our narratives of the development of the novel genre. This argument is illustrated through an extended analysis of two of the most significant young novelists to engage recently with issues of settler colonial history: Eleanor Catton of New Zealand and Rohan Wilson of Australia

The Question of “Solidarity” in Postcolonial Trauma Fiction: Beyond the Recognition Principle

Dominant theorizations of cultural trauma often appeal to the twinned notions of “recognition” and “solidarity”, suggesting that by inviting readers to recognize distant suffering, trauma narratives enable forms of cross-cultural solidarity to emerge. This paper explores and critiques that argument with reference to postcolonial literature. It surveys four areas of postcolonial trauma, examining works that narrate traumatic experiences of the colonized, colonizers, perpetrators and proletarians. It explores how novelists locate traumatic affects in the body, and suggests that Frantz Fanon’s model of racial trauma in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth remains essential for the interpretation of postcolonial texts, including those to which it is not usually applied. The analysis further reveals tensions between different texts’ appeals for recognition, and suggests that these tensions problematize the claim that solidarity will emerge from sympathetic engagement with trauma victims. As such, the paper makes three key arguments: first, that trauma offers a productive ground for comparing postcolonial fiction; second, that comparison uncovers problems for theorists attempting to “decolonize” trauma studies; and third, that trauma theory needs to be supplemented with systemic material analyses of particular contexts if it is not to obfuscate what makes postcolonial traumas distinct

In defence of 'the lesser cousin of history': An interview with Rohan Wilson

Few branches of postcolonial literature are as contested as the historical fiction of settler societies. This interview with the Australian historical novelist Rohan Wilson, author of The Roving Party (2011) and To Name Those Lost (2014), explores the intersections between truth, accuracy, and existential authenticity in his fictional accounts of nineteenth-century Tasmania. Wilson offers a nuanced yet robust defence of fiction’s role in narrating colonial history. He explains his intentions in writing two linked yet distinctive novels of the frontier—one that focuses on the “Black War” of the 1820s and 1830s, and another that explores how racial violence is refracted by capitalism in subsequent decades

Deborah Shapple\u27s \u3cem\u3eBritish Colonial Realism in Africa: Inalienable Objects, Contested Domains\u3c/em\u3e (review)

Excerpt: Since the publication of Edward W. Said’s Culture and Imperialism in 1994, postcolonial literary critics have usually treated nineteenth-century European fiction as ideologically and imaginatively complicit with the major powers’ attempts to occupy, control, and reorganise distant territories. Deborah Shapple Spillman’s British Colonial Realism in Africa adds weight and nuance to this argument. She demonstrates how late nineteenth-century colonial realist texts—both literary and ethnographic—drew upon structures of thought that allowed unfamiliar peoples to be subsumed within Eurocentric world views

Temporal Systems in Representations of the Past: Distance, Freedom and Irony in Historical Fiction

A common response to the historical novel's blurring of the boundary between history and fiction is to search for something that distinguishes the two. A concept sometimes invoked is the idea of 'distance' - a spatial metaphor that names the conceptual separation between past and present assumed to be a precondition of historical understanding. Disciplinary history, the argument goes, depends on respecting the distance between the current-day researcher and his or her objects of inquiry. Fiction, by contrast, breaks that distance down, creating a seductive but disabling illusion of immersion in a past world. As a way of defining the difference between modes of representation, temporal distance affirms the superiority of professional history and dismisses the historical novel as entertaining, but epistemologically misguided. Yet the idea that history and fiction can be distinguished like this occludes the ways that temporality is constructed textually. As Mikhail Bakhtin argues, time is not an abstract medium within which stories happen, but is produced in the course of narrative, and can take forms substantially more complex - and with more significant aesthetic and ideological implications - than the binary between distance and proximity allows (1981, 84�5). This essay examines the construction of temporal distance in historical novels

Timothy Bewes\u27 \u3cem\u3eThe Event of Postcolonial Shame\u3c/em\u3e (review)

Excerpt: In this important and appealing contribution to literary theory, Timothy Bewes explores a question that hovers in the background of postcolonial criticism: what is the significance of shame for a literature defined by its engagement with histories of imperial domination, violence, and exclusion? Bewes\u27 approach is innovative and remarkably productive of critical insight. He addresses shame not, as we might expect, as an affect or emotional result of some morally-compromising experience, but as a structural effect of writing itself. Shame should be seen, he argues, neither as a subjective emotion (23) nor an ethical response (28) to particular experiences. Rather, it is a manifestation of the structural inadequacy of writing to communicate traumatic histories; it is, in other words, the experience of a prolonged incommensurability between a form and a substance (2). In reformulating shame in this way, Bewes draws inspiration from Lukács\u27 famous account in The Theory of the Novel of how modern literature is defined by aesthetic incompleteness, making shame intrinsic not only to the representation of certain historical events, but to the very attempt to write at all. Shame is a quality of writing, Bewes argues, it cannot exist outside writing or, more accurately, outside the relations of incommensurability that writing emblematizes; nor can shame be adequately encoded or conveyed within a literary apparatus. There is no shame without form; moreover, in a [End Page 386] world of \u27absolute sinfulness\u27 there is no form without shame. Form materializes shame by its inadequacy (46). As the book\u27s title suggests, postcolonial shame is neither an emotion nor an affect; it is an event, one that no writing can avoid

The Question of “Solidarity” in Postcolonial Trauma Fiction: Beyond the Recognition Principle

Dominant theorizations of cultural trauma often appeal to the twinned notions of “recognition” and “solidarity”, suggesting that by inviting readers to recognize distant suffering, trauma narratives enable forms of cross-cultural solidarity to emerge. This paper explores and critiques that argument with reference to postcolonial literature. It surveys four areas of postcolonial trauma, examining works that narrate traumatic experiences of the colonized, colonizers, perpetrators and proletarians. It explores how novelists locate traumatic affects in the body, and suggests that Frantz Fanon’s model of racial trauma in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth remains essential for the interpretation of postcolonial texts, including those to which it is not usually applied. The analysis further reveals tensions between different texts’ appeals for recognition, and suggests that these tensions problematize the claim that solidarity will emerge from sympathetic engagement with trauma victims. As such, the paper makes three key arguments: first, that trauma offers a productive ground for comparing postcolonial fiction; second, that comparison uncovers problems for theorists attempting to “decolonize” trauma studies; and third, that trauma theory needs to be supplemented with systemic material analyses of particular contexts if it is not to obfuscate what makes postcolonial traumas distinct