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Rajiva, Jay. Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma., Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 54, Issue 3, July 2018, Page 376, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqy034
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Extract
Rajiva seeks to challenge what he sees as the unsatisfactory application of Eurocentric theories to non-Western narratives of trauma, and instead proposes a different model of response that privileges aesthetics and narrative structure as a means of accessing meaning within postcolonial texts. His work pushes back against the concept of the postcolonial text as artefact, or as a source of gaining understanding of a historical or political situation in the past, and re-positions it as a body in itself – a body that can be approached and apprehended through the reading process. Using the theory of Jean-Luc Nancy in particular, Rajiva argues for tactility, for the embodied practice of reading, as an ethical way to encounter (traumatized) bodies in postcolonial texts. He employs the metaphor of the parabola to evoke a sense of proximity or prosthetic closeness that does not collapse reader and text into one, but maintains a sense of distance that allows for respect for cultural difference. This idea of vexed contact, or ‘productive excess’ is perhaps one of the main strengths of a book that puts postcolonial regions (South Asia and South Africa) into productive comparative dialogue with each other. The three main chapters perform astute textual analysis of works by Devi, Coetzee, Behr, Sidhwa, Dangor and Ondaatje. This focus on texts originating from regions where physical separation, partition, and apartheid marked the process of decolonization is particularly successful, although it is hard to understand the lack of engagement with memory studies in Rajiva’s book – his employment of ‘prosthetic’ does not reference Alison Landsberg’s work, for example, and concepts such as Sarah Nuttall’s ‘entanglement’ might have provided further layers of theoretical richness. Overall, this is an intriguing and conceptually ambitious work that could perhaps have been more confident in outlining and establishing the contours of its own line of argument in relation to existing fields of study.
