My talk will be a presentation of the main arguments that ground my book project, “Miraculous Corpse: Tragedy and Postcoloniality.” Close reading the work of C. L. R. James, (1901-1981), Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), and Assia Djebar (1936-2015), “Miraculous Corpse” reconsiders the centrality of tragic forms of thought and art to the conception of “postcoloniality,” regarded here as both a strategy of critical thinking and the predicament of inhabiting the aftermaths of colonial domination. In my talk, I will focus on one of the central components of the book: my uncovering of each author’s reanimation of tragedy’s constitutive but often underread relationship to the funeral ritual. To formulate their own theory of “postcoloniality,” the writers I study reconceive and redramatize this relationship in a myriad of ways. This technique of representation, you will see, makes it possible to redress the grief that ensues from the destruction of old temporal structures that made certain vistas of freedom legible. It also enables writers to dramatize differently the events through which official narratives of and monuments to national history are created. What I then hope to demonstrate is how a writer recovers the past through tragic structures of thought and representation in order to make appear what I am calling the “miraculous corpse.”

Anjuli I. Gunaratne is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. Interested in the literatures of the former British and French colonies, Anjuli is at work on a book tentatively titled Miraculous Corpse: Tragedy and Postcoloniality, which studies the emergence of tragedy as a dramatic, narrative, and philosophical form in postcolonial literature, with a special focus on Caribbean novelists and poets.

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.