The doctoral dissertation in the field of English Language and culture will be examined at the Philosophical Faculty at Joensuu campus.
What is the topic of your doctoral research? Why is it important to study the topic?
My dissertation examines how contemporary Afro-Atlantic fiction negotiates the traumas of slavery and its legacies. Using three novels as case studies, I focus on how these texts approach and represent the traumatic horrors of slavery, and how they draw attention to the way slavery continues to impact people and societies through its various afterlives.
I analyse the three novels by focusing on their content, their conceptualisation of trauma, and their literary aesthetics. Studying this topic is important because it allows insight into how the traumas of slavery and its legacies affect present-day individuals and societies across the world. Recent events showcase how societies struggle to acknowledge and come to terms with ‘uncomfortable’ pasts, which involve the infliction of traumas – both individual and cultural – as a consequence of involvement in colonialism and slavery. Fiction, and art more broadly, can help us better navigate these issues.
What are the key findings or observations of your doctoral research?
My study finds that contemporary Afro-Atlantic trauma fiction takes a more explicitly politicised approach to representing the traumas of slavery and its legacies, with an emphasis on how these traumas reverberate in the present. This confrontational approach is facilitated by the use of postmodern aesthetics and a multifaceted conceptualisation of trauma. With regard to the former, the novels explicitly demonstrate the connections between the past and the present, and position the reader in a way which generates (self-)reflection on their position regarding slavery and its afterlives. As for the latter, the texts conceptualise of trauma in a way that exceeds the traditional notion of trauma as a single extreme event affecting an individual. The novels also draw explicit attention to the structures that facilitate or generate traumas.
The dissertation contributes to the field of literary trauma studies because of its subject matter and approach. Postcolonial or so-called ‘non-Western’ traumas were largely ignored by literary trauma studies for a considerable length of time; this study offers a welcome addition to the emerging sub-field of postcolonial trauma studies. Because of its focus on aesthetics, my research also provides a valuable contribution to postcolonial studies, which has often neglected to consider the relevance of a text’s literariness. My dissertation views aesthetics as intertwined with and thus crucial to a text’s socio-political properties and impact.
How can the results of your doctoral research be utilised in practice?
For the scientific community, the study contributes to emerging postcolonial approaches to literary trauma studies. Its results and approach may prove useful to future scholarship exploring this perspective. The focus on content, aesthetics, and conceptualisation of trauma may likewise provide a foundation for further research.
To the general public, my research underlines the value and importance of literature and art more broadly as able to aid the process of acknowledging, remembering, and working through traumatic pasts which continue to haunt the present. Through its aesthetic qualities, literary fiction offers us a unique means of engaging with (hi)stories, allowing us or even obliging us to adopt different perspectives, to reflect and (re)consider our own position. Stories are never just stories, but are always politically engaged to a certain extent. They not only reflect our world, but also actively shape our view on it, and anticipate means in which it may change.
What are the key research methods and materials used in your doctoral research?
My research takes its cue from what I refer to as the postcolonial turn in literary trauma studies. My theoretical framework combines recent postcolonial critique of traditional trauma theory with postmodern perspectives on history and literature. My postmodern approach predominantly draws on Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction. I argue that a postmodern outlook on history and aesthetics is exceptionally compatible with the political concerns of postcolonialism. Because of its focus on the way the traumas of slavery and its legacies are (dis)remembered, my research also draws on the field of memory studies. The German term Vergangenheitsbewältigung, referring to the process of coming to terms with and working through the past, is a recurring notion in my work.
The three case studies of my dissertation are Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. The selected texts reflect the anglophone Afro-Atlantic.
Further information: Dirk van Rens, [email protected]
