Sam Durrant | University of Leeds (original) (raw)

Papers by Sam Durrant

In this essay we make two seemingly contradictory arguments regarding the relationship between tr... more In this essay we make two seemingly contradictory arguments regarding the relationship between trauma and postcolonial theory: trauma theory has always been postcolonial, and it is not yet postcolonial. By highlighting the similarities between Cathy Caruth's and Edward Said's readings of Freud's Moses and Monotheism, we argue that trauma theory, much like postcolonial critique, is centrally concerned with the undoing of identitarian binds. We therefore suggest that Caruth's theory of implicated subjectivity, which she pulls from Freud, is more in line with postcolonial theory than critics of her Eurocentrism (who often hinge their argument on identity politics) have recognized. At the same time, her theory of implication must become more postcolonial, we argue, by moving beyond its anthropocentric coordinates. As authors such as Derek Walcott and Uzodinma Iweala demonstrate, a postcolonial approach to trauma studies must begin by apprehending the cosmological damage wreaked by colonial modernity, which implicates not only humans, but entire systems of relations amidst the cosmos. By placing Walcott's and Iweala's writings in dialogue with Freud's reading of Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated, we propose our concept of cosmological trauma, which names the rupture in relational networks central to colonization. The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism. Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this essay we make two seemingly contradictory arguments. Our first thesis is that trauma theory has always been postcolonial. We thus place Cathy Caruth's and Edward Said's readings of Freud's Moses and Monotheism in dialogue, suggesting that both trauma theory and postcolonial theory have been centrally concerned with the traumatic origin of racial and cultural difference. Our second thesis is that trauma theory is not yet postcolonial. We thus also argue that Caruth's concept of traumatic implication must be extended to the more-than-human world 24

New Formations, 2021

This essay reads the so-called ‘new animism’ alongside the historical materialism of Benjamin, Ho... more This essay reads the so-called ‘new animism’ alongside the historical materialism of Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno. The aim is to draw out the political dimensions of the former and the ecological dimensions of the latter. New animism shares with historical materialism a critique of modernity and the alienation produced by the separation of the human sphere of culture from the nonhuman field of nature. Both theories are interested in animism as exemplary refusal of this separation and both seek a mimetic, non-objectifying, relation to the world. New animism operates to correct historical materialism’s Eurocentric tendency to think of such ‘naturecultures’ as premodern and thus superceded, showing what can still be learnt from the example of specific indigenous peoples and their animistic engagement with the more than human world. But historical materialism’s dialectical approach to history also helps to guard against the romanticisation of animism and dehistoricised models of animistic relations to ‘nature’. Capitalist modernity is not simply the extirpation of animism, the turning of souls into things, but also itself a modified form of animism, the turning of things into magical commodities. Once we understand the mythic nature of capitalism, the critical task becomes not to reanimate the world but to counter-animate it. Both new animism and historical materialism are utopian in their investment in a spirited, more than human world, but the latter also seeks to promote what I call a critical spiritedness, an ironised, melancholic identification with our fellow beings, both human and nonhuman, as subject to history and thus, in Adorno’s phrasing, ‘damaged life’. In the final part of my essay, I consider the way in which art can channel this critical spirit through an exploration of Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film Dead Man, and its counter-animation of the cinematic tradition of the Western. The film is at once a melancholic critique of the deanimating, ecocidal and genocidal consequences of Western expansion and an attempt to respiritualise the cinematic gaze through a creaturely identification with damaged life..

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma. Ed. Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja. London: Routledge, 2020

Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, 2019

This essay, part of a volume I have co-edited with Emma Cox, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge a... more This essay, part of a volume I have co-edited with Emma Cox, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge and David Farrier for Edinburgh UP, begins by comparing the disavowals that structure the exclusionary discourses of nationalism with the less evident disavowals that structure the seemingly inclusionary discourses of cosmopolitanism. I then distinguish between a normative, liberal cosmopolitanism that disavows its own limits in its assumption that refugee life is knowable and hence mournable and a cosmopolitan melancholia for which refugee life remains ungrievable. In the second section I offer a brief analysis of how cosmopolitanism has fallen out of favour in postcolonial studies, comparing Homi Bhabha’s cosmopolitan critique of nationalism (1990) with Simon Gikandi’s critique of postcolonialism as a form of cosmopolitan elitism that has ‘nothing in common’ with refugee life (2010). Gikandi’s performance of postcolonialism’s non-relation to the refugee prepares the way for my third and final section, a reading of Teju Cole’s extraordinary 2011 novel, Open City, as an example of how refugee life is encrypted within cosmopolitan privilege: while the narrator, Julius, displays all the aphasic symptoms of cosmopolitan melancholia, the novel itself is an exercise in critical cosmopolitan melancholia in so far as it exposes the disavowed (and in this case, transgenerational) memory of ‘absolute destitution’ (Cole 2011: 80) at the heart of Julius’ life of privilege and his violently gendered implication in the unworlding of others. The proper role of cosmopolitan aesthetics is thus, I argue, not simply to solicit sympathy for the plight of the refugee but to effect an auto-critical exposure of cosmopolitanism’s implication in the global structures of oppression and exclusion that produce statelessness.

Research in African Literatures, 2019

The current tendency to read African literature as a representation of necropolitics reinforces t... more The current tendency to read African literature as a representation of necropolitics reinforces the very image of Africa as the heart of darkness that Achille Mbembe’s work seeks to dismantle, obscuring his emphasis on the creative “languages of life” that exceed the necropolitical. Animism is one such language of life and in so far as African literature draws on animistic impulses, I argue that it has the capacity to resist the necropolitical drive to annihilate ancestry. Animist literature moves beyond the secular task of representation in order to reconstitute itself as a surrogate rite of re-ancestralisation, as the articulation of a radically expanded, transhuman spirit of ancestry. Chris Abani’s 2007 novel Song for Night is an exemplary allegorisation of this expansive process of re-ancestralisation in that its narrator, blown apart by a landmine, must reinvent his Igbo grandfather’s forgotten song of connectedness in order to re-join the world of the ancestors. In so far as his lyrical song for night transposes the improvised sign-language of his platoon of muted mine-sweepers, the narrative mimes their creative resistance to the instrumentalisation of human life. However, this creativity does not constitute a recovery of the human so much as a spirited affirmation of corporeal similarity, or what I term creaturely mimesis.

The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, 2014

Taking Butler’s Precarious Life as my guide to our bleak historical times, my argument is that th... more Taking Butler’s Precarious Life as my guide to our bleak historical times, my argument is that the end of trauma theory (its purpose, future, utopian horizon) is something like a shared consciousness of our common corporeal vulnerability. Rather than constructing yet another model of deconstructive ethics, my aim is to theorize what I variously term a critical or material(ist) mourning, a mourning that works to undo not simply ‘the idea of the sovereign subject’ but sovereignty itself, property relations, and the human assumption of sovereignty over nature. Firstly, I explore David Lloyd’s materialist critique of the way in which the memorialization of the Irish Famine is complicit with the drive of a ‘therapeutic modernity’ that teaches postcolonial subjects how to ‘lose our loss’ and thereby ‘enter more lightly into the new world order’ (222). Secondly, I return to Horkeimer and Adorno’s famous reading of The Odyssey as the legitimation of modernity and of the not quite successful attempt to simultaneously record and suppress the memory of the traumatic violence involved in the process of (re)establishing settlement. Their reading of the epic suggests that literary form is another version of Freud’s protective shield, that the ideology of form insulates the subject from consciousness of its own constitutive violence. And thirdly, I explore a cycle of poems on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by the South African poet Ingrid de Kok, a cycle which works to recover a sense of our common corporeality precisely by being critical of its own mourning work, by undoing both its own lyric form and its ideological status as literature of, or ‘for’, reconciliation. Precisely because form is historically determined, or what Adorno terms ‘sedimented content’, its auto-critique becomes a critical questioning of the terms of postapartheid settlement. Throughout this essay, my interest will be in the relationship between mourning and property; the integrity of a term such as critical mourning forever depends upon its capacity to unsettle the claims of sovereignty, in its colonial and postcolonial guises alike.

This essay is an exploration of how tragedy enables a colonised people to inherit, and thus survi... more This essay is an exploration of how tragedy enables a colonised people to inherit, and thus survive, a traumatic past, focusing on Achebe's Things Fall Apart. In order to conjure, on the eve of Nigerian independence, that elusive spirit of the people, Achebe seems to suggest that his readers must find a way of inheriting the alienated spirit of Okonkwo. As many critics have pointed out, macho tendency to valorize violent action over reason and dialogue is only representative of one side of Ibo society. Nevertheless, Achebe’s novel is structured in such a way as to suggest that it is indeed Okonkwo’s spirit that must be recovered if his contemporary readers are to reconnect with their history. They must find a way of ‘ancestralising’ his lost spirit, of resacralising his polluted corpse, if they are to overcome their own estrangement.
The essay is part of a larger project which thinks through the ways in which the African novel works as a surrogate mode of inheritance in the wake of modernity's drive to abolish ancestral ties.

Essays in Migratory Aesthetics, 2007

Third World Quarterly, 2005