Postcolonial Parabola : Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma

Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma interrogates the relationship between the literary representation of postcolonial trauma and the embodied experience of reading. As the conditions from which postcolonial literatures have emerged require a break from “proper” ways to represent trauma, postcolonial writers expand and complicate the practice of reading itself.

Though postcolonial literature's capacity to represent trauma has received considerable scrutiny in recent years, Postcolonial Parabola is innovative in its consideration of the postcolonial text as a literary object. Working within a phenomenological framework that ties together disparate postcolonial periods, Jay Rajiva explores how narrative structure shapes the experience of reading the postcolonial literatures of South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. He argues that these texts enmesh the reader in an asymptotic tactility: though readers might approach the disclosure of trauma, they cannot arrive at it. Awareness of the asymptotic nature of reading such works is crucial to a meaningful, ethical engagement with literary representations of postcolonial trauma.

“Jay Rajiva's illuminating and engaging book makes a valuable contribution to postcolonial trauma studies. It manages to stand out in this increasingly crowded field thanks to its novel methodology and fresh comparative approach, productively connecting narratives bearing witness to South Asian and South African historical tragedies through a sustained focus on the tactility of the encounter between reader and trauma text.” —Stef Craps, Associate Professor of English Literature, Ghent University, Belgium, and author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds

“Postcolonial Parabola is a brave and important milestone in the ongoing attempt to read trauma beyond the Euro-American context of trauma studies. Its subtle, compelling and highly original readings show how, like the arc of a parabola, literary narratives from South Africa and the Indian subcontinent approach but never quite 'touch' traumatic experience. Drawing on the work of Derrida and Nancy, Rajiva takes the phenomenological account of embodiment to its own limit: the reader's experience of postcolonial trauma is necessarily prosthetic, haunted by a distance that it can never quite traverse. In showing how this distance is differently calibrated by the form that each narrative takes, Postcolonial Parabola is a masterfully measured exposition of precisely what it is that postcolonial literature can-and cannot-offer its readers.” —Sam Durrant, Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature, University of Leeds, UK

“This is an intriguing and conceptually ambitious work.” —Forum for Modern Language Studies