This dissertation is a study of how slave rebellions continue to exert a profound political, affective and cultural influence on postcolonial writers. These writers claim histories and memories of such rebellions as strategic allegories, which enable both articulations of contemporary concerns about neocolonial and neoliberal forms of governmentality, as well as the resistances to such. Through an examination of texts by Ghanaian playwright Mohammed Ben Abdallah, Haitian poet and novelist Évelyne Trouillot, Canadian-Caribbean writer Dionne Brand, and Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, I argue that these narratives demonstrate that our present moment of globalized capital and its accompanying forms of expropriation, though seemingly disembodied and all-pervasive, bear suggestive resemblances to the ethical and political questions raised by the global machinery of slavery. Memories of slave rebellions operate as vital forms of oppositional narratives in these texts, providing writers with an imaginary of a foundational class struggle which threatens the existing status quo. While such narrativizations remobilize the cultural memories of earlier radicalisms, they also point out the failures of such radical imaginaries to move beyond a privileging of certain forms of heroic and heteronormative revolutionary black masculinity. By foregrounding women within the spaces of the slave rebellions, these texts de-masculinize the dominant masculinisms of slave rebellion narratives of previous eras. In doing so, they complicate the notion of racialized class struggles as theaters of supremacy between two classes of men, and challenges the reduction of enslaved women into passive allegories of family, community and nation. / text

<p>Focusing on a diverse set of creative work from Europe, East and South Asia, the Americas, Middle East, and Africa, Minor Measures investigates modalities of world writing through modernist, postcolonial and contemporary transnational literatures in the intertwined moments of imperialism, developmentalism and globalism. It studies the category of world literature as a heterogeneous set of narrative-cognitive forms and comparative modes of gauging from a particular positionality the world-systemic pressures on individual and collective bodies. To this end, Minor Measures focuses on the dynamic and increasingly central role of geoliterary imagination in fashioning a secular hermeneutic that maps the relationships and overlaps between the local and the global, here and there, past and present, self and other. Moreover, it highlights the capacities of the literary aesthetics in configuring local subjectivities, affiliations and histories in relation to the abstract cartographic totality of global modernity. Shuttling back and forth between the two poles, literature as world writing refers to the unconscious framework of representing the contingencies of the lived experience of economically, racially, and geographically differentiated subjects from metropolitan, (post)colonial and diasporic positions.</p> / Dissertation

A partir du repérage d’un point aveugle de la littérature générale et comparée, ce travail vise à faire de la littérature turque le site d’interrogation de la discipline et de l’intelligibilité régionale de la littérature européenne. La mondialisation du discours critique permet de situer la réception de la littérature européenne chez un romancier turc contemporain dans le cadre des échanges littéraires inégaux entre un espace littéraire ancien et très doté et la périphérie turque. Les particularités de ce champ socio-Historique dont Orhan Pamuk est tributaire permettent de comprendre sa trajectoire exceptionnelle, mais aussi son ethos de lecteur de la bibliothèque européenne, marqué par l’excentricité et l’héritage de la dépendance. Dès lors, l’étude du recours d’Orhan Pamuk au roman européen met en valeur trois usages de celui-Ci : un usage mimétique, un usage générique et un usage architextuel dont témoigne la réécriture des Buddenbrook de Thomas Mann. Le recours au roman dostoïevskien met en lumière, quant à lui, l’homologie structurale de deux anciens empires dans le rapport à l’Europe, et révèle à Orhan Pamuk l’intelligibilité des « démons » de la Turquie. Le roman pamukien se présente alors comme une négociation poétique de la dépendance et de l’excentricité de la littérature et du roman turcs. La poétique intertextuelle très appuyée, dans un geste de réécriture du canon (Proust, Dante, Dostoïevski) permet la captation de l’héritage littéraire européen ; la poétique de la taklit, centrée sur les jeux fictionnels et les feintises ludiques, permet enfin de transmuer le complexe de dépendance mimétique dans une nouvelle catharsis romanesque de laquelle émerge la « fiction » de l’auteur pamukien. / Having identified a blind spot in general and comparative literature, this work proposes to introduce Turkish literature as a questioning site within the field which also interrogates the regional comprehensibility of European literature. The globalization of literary criticism allows us to locate the reception of European literature within the work of a contemporary Turkish novelist in the wider context of an unbalanced literary exchange between on the one hand an ancient and rich literary space and the Turkish periphery on the other. The particularities of this social and historical field to which Orhan Pamuk is affiliated account for his trajectory in world literature, while also shedding light on his ethos as a reader of the European library, itself characterized by eccentricity and an inherited dependency. It follows that studying Orhan Pamuk’s use to the European novel brings to light a mimetic, a generic and an architextual use, as shown by his rewriting of Mann’s Buddenbrooks. As for his use of the Dostoevskian novel, it highlights the structural homology of the two former Empires in relation to Europe, and lays bare to Orhan Pamuk Turkey’s “demons” in all their legibility. The Pamukian novel presents itself as a poetical negotiation with the dependency and eccentricity of Turkish literature and the Turkish novel. Rewriting the canon (Proust, Dante, Dostoevsky) with glowing intertextual poetics, Pamuk captures the European literary inheritance ; these taklit poetics, replete with fictional games and playful sham facilitate the conversion of this net of mimetic dependency into a new novelistic catharsis from which the “fiction” of the Pamukien author emerges.

This is a project that takes inequality as its starting point to ask not why it persists in all its myriad forms, but rather how we might better understand its resiliency in order to re-orient our responses. It asks how we can re-imagine one another and work across asymmetrical divides in ways that move us towards substantial forms of social justice, actively disallowing the entrenchment of hierarchical valuing systems, and how we can engage with literature as part of reconfiguring ‘equality’ in the process. These questions are traced through Indigenous women’s literatures in Canada and black South African women’s literatures as sites of deeply textured resistance and re-imagined relationality. My analysis focuses on select texts from the 1980s to present in two primary archives: from Indigenous Canada, The Book of Jessica: A Theatrical Transformation (Maria Campbell in collaboration with Linda Griffiths) and Monkey Beach (Eden Robinson); and from South Africa, Mother to Mother (Sindiwe Magona) and Coconut (Kopano Matlwa). I use conversation as my methodological and thematic compass for seeking modes of enabling comprehension across perniciously unequal systems of making meaning and considering the possibilities for transformative knowledge production and textual interpretation at sites of unequal intersubjective exchange. I employ an uneasy comparative practice that I base on horizontal forms of juxtaposition within conversational structures, and I argue that conversation’s generative instability and risky uncertainty open onto hopeful possibilities for transformative change. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This project examines a small selection of the literatures by Indigenous women writers in Canada and black South African women writers to conceptualize anti-oppressive approaches to working across differences in both literary/scholarly and activist/lived contexts. It uses conversation as a critical methodology for engaging four primary texts and practicing an uneasy comparative method based on horizontal forms of juxtaposition rather than vertical relations of evaluative power: Mother to Mother (Sindiwe Magona) and The Book of Jessica (Maria Campbell and Linda Griffiths); and Coconut (Kopano Matlwa) and Monkey Beach (Eden Robinson). The overall aim is to re-imagine forms of engaging across difference along a range of registers – racialization, gender, nation, class, language, and geographical location – that create conditions for more expansive and substantive forms of social justice than are currently visible. The project draws on feminist, Indigenous, postcolonial, critical race, and related areas of scholarship with an orientation towards social justice.