Event overview
Dr Padraig Kirwan of Goldsmiths ECL and Dr Denise deCaires Narain of University of Sussex will contribute to the final 'Beyond the Linear Narrative' event of the summer.
Padraig Kirwin – Goldsmiths, University of London
"'Choctalk' Nation': Narrative Sovereignty in LeAnne Howe's Shell Shaker'".
Padraig Kirwan will consider the ways in which the Native American LeAnne Howe's 'Shell Shaker' appears to engage with various forms of sovereignty (tribal, political, and/or artistic), and will question the extent to which the novel can be said to provide a commentary on moments of contact between the citizens of modern nation states.
(LeAnne Howe is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a professor of English at the University of Illinois. Her works include the novels 'Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story' and 'Shell Shaker'; the one-woman play 'Choctalking on Other Realities'; the PBS documentary 'Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire'; and her short film 'Playing Pastime'.)
Denise deCaires Narain - University of Sussex
‘Half-and-half’: fractured narratives and the intimacies, limits and possibilities of maid/madam relationships.
This paper explores the way that relationships between domestic workers and their female employers are represented in texts by a selection of Southern African and Caribbean women writers who seek, in different ways, to engage with differences across class and race boundaries.
Taking the phrase ‘half-and-half’ from Marlene Van Niekerk’s short story ‘Labour’, the paper explores the fractured, incomplete affiliations that these stories dramatize in their treatment of maid/madam relationships. In addition to Van Niekerk’s ‘Labour’, texts to be considered include, Phyllis Shand Allfrey’s ‘O Stay and Hear’, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Olive Senior’s ‘Discerner of Hearts’, Alexandra Fuller’s ‘Fancy Dress’ and Zoe Wicomb’s ‘You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town’. The paper looks at the diverse narrative strategies deployed in the texts to signal the disruptive and/or unsettling potential of servants. If the literary texts present complicated textual intimacies, can critical discourse avoid reinstalling the very boundaries that the literary texts seek to circumvent (however ambivalently)? The paper concludes (or, rather ‘opens up’) by reflecting on suggestive critical intersections that might encourage a more open-ended (or ‘half-and-half’) critical practice, one in which ‘creolization’ and ‘queer’ paradigms might intersect with Sarah Nuttal’s suggestive arguments about ‘entanglement’.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 8 Jun 2011 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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