This dissertation examines how contemporary Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone literature from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia (1984-present) reconfigures historical archives to negotiate the ethics of representing state violence in repressive societies. I identify new literary forms politically conscious writers are devising to capture and contest human rights violations. Using an interdisciplinary decolonial feminist framework, I closely read works by Cristina Peri Rossi, Michael Ondaatje, M. NourbeSe Philip, Edwidge Danticat, Boubacar Boris Diop, and Roberto Bolaño— a diverse set of postcolonial and post-dictatorship writers never before compared in comparative literature. I call these writers’ endeavors to reframe traumatic history “arts of the impossible,” which defy the alleged unrepresentability of collective trauma to secure justice and forestall impunity. I compare representations of wide-ranging atrocities including forced disappearance, slavery, genocide, and femicide— crimes exemplifying what I term “ontological erasure.” At stake in ontological erasure are not simply lost perspectives from multiply marginalized victims, like women and queer people of color, but the very possibility of citizenship and the will to dissent state recognition enables. To resist the threats posed by the authorization of these crimes to political freedom, these writers, I argue, reinvent evidentiary forms historically suppressed by authoritarian states, including court transcripts, testimonies, forensic reports, and national archives. These authors’ innovations push the boundaries of what counts as “evidence” in acts of state violence that are uniquely determined by erasure; they also imagine new methods for remembering past atrocities without compromising recognition for stigmatized minorities in the future.

This thesis examines how the First World War and the Holocaust fit into Western history and literary history by. It takes as its point of departure two arguments that currently enjoy, the favor of many specialists. First, it critiques the idea that the literature of the First World War is firmly embedded in the Western literary heritage while that of the Holocaust lies outside the realm of expression, a position that Jay Winter has taken a leading role in developing. Second, it challenges the notion that the Holocaust is an occurrence in history to which no other event offers parallels. The study argues that these points of view obscure our understanding of each disaster. In reality, personal narratives demonstrate that many survivors responded to the First World War and the Holocaust in similar ways. If this is true, then the Great War cannot be firmly embedded in the European cultural tradition while the Holocaust destroys it. A more accurate representation is that the first episode of industrial mass slaughter, the Great War, initiated a rupture in the Western historical and literary heritage that the Holocaust completed. / Department of History

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2007. / Also available via the World Wide Web. Includes bibliographical references.

This study aims to interrogate the representations of forgiveness in post genocide Rwandan fiction. The novels analysed are Inyenzi: A story of Love and Genocide (2007), Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust (2006) and God Sleeps in Rwanda: A Journey of Transformation (2009). Inyenzi: A story of Love and Genocide represents romantic love as the possible beginning of reconciliation between the Tutsi and the Hutus after and the devastations of the genocide. Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust reveals that the individualistic portrayal of forgiveness is important to create communication between antagonistic ethnic groups. God Sleeps in Rwanda: A Journey of Transformation demonstrates that forgiveness and reconciliation have the possibilities of being attainable on a national level through political reforms. The narratives succeed in portraying the representations of forgiveness but due to the subjectivities of the authors, the historicity of the genocide is undermined thereby compromising the foundations for forgiveness. This study suggests that future research on post genocide Rwandan could analyse creative works on forgiveness but focussing on the issue of restorative justice / English Studies / M. A. (English Studies)