ABSTRACT
This book examines representations of violence across the postcolonial world—from the Americas to Australia—in novels, short stories, plays, and films. The chapters move from what appear to be interpersonal instances of violence to communal conflicts such as civil war, showing how these acts of violence are specifically rooted in colonial forms of abuse and oppression but constantly move and morph. Taking its cue from theories in such fields as postcolonial, violence, gender, and trauma studies, the book thus shows that violence is slippery in form, but also fluid in nature, so that one must trace its movement across time and space to understand even a single instance of it. When analysing such forms and trajectories of violence in postcolonial creative writing and films, the contributors critically examine the ethical issues involved in narrating abuse, depicting violated bodies, and presenting romanticized resolutions that may conceal other forms of violence.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part Section 1|77 pages
Intimate and Gender Violence
chapter 2|16 pages
Narrating Jamaican and Cypriot Colonial Legacies
chapter 3|20 pages
Unscrambling the “Grammar of Violence”
chapter 4|19 pages
Violating Virgins
part Section 2|52 pages
Violence and War
chapter 5|18 pages
Reading Testimony
chapter 6|13 pages
An Uneasy Alliance
chapter 7|19 pages
Cinematic Representations of South African Gang Violence
part Section 3|63 pages
Violence on the Move