Session IX: Effects of Spatial Transgressions in Postcolonial Settings

Michele Willman (University of North Dakota, Grand Forks ND): "The Abjection of Female Voices in Danarembga’s Nervous Conditions"

At the end of Nervous Conditions, Tambu’s mother insists that “’it’s the Englishness’” that has killed or brought illness to Nhamo, Nyasha and Chido, as well as to her daughter, Tambu. Throughout the novel, the clash of English colonial culture with local culture has difficult and devastating consequences for the novels protagonist, Tambu, as well as for the other characters in the novel. Tambu sees this clash of cultures manifesting itself on the female characters in the novel in extreme ways that have a lasting effect on both their bodies and their minds. As the “Englishness” is poured into their bodies, largely in the form of education from the Betty and Ben stories to the tomes of colonial history that Tambu studies at the mission school, physical substances associated with life and daily living are poured out. There is a growing aversion to substances that enter, exit or come into contact with the female body: dirt, soot, smoke, food, urine and feces and even menstrual blood. This aversion grows to include even vocalization and breath—it becomes difficult for speech or language to pass into or out of the body, rendering the female body both mute and physically desiccated.

As the women are removed farther and farther from the realm associated with the female, such as the kitchen, cooking, cleaning and dirt, the more they can take in “Englishness,” or colonial culture in the form of language, books and education. Substances associated with the female realm become abject and women’s spaces become abject spaces. In order to fit into the hybrid culture, the women of the novel must compromise their gender, reject female space and female substances, and damage their bodies in order to do so. I argue that in this context, even speech—words and sounds passing in and out of the women’s bodies—becomes abject. The women have difficulty voicing their concerns, feelings and fears because the act of speaking and speaking one’s mind become associated with other abject substances that enter and exit the body. Female voices in Nervous Conditions become an abject substance that must be purged in order to acclimate to the Englishness of the hybrid culture.


Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (University of North Dakota, Grand Forks ND): "The Lost Child in Canadian, South African and Australian Literature"

This paper will compare three works of literature for how they develop the motif of the lost child. The “lost child” topos is well known in Australia literature in tales like the children’s classic “Dot and the Red Kangaroo,” which tells about a young girl wandering off in the Australian bush rescued from certain death by a kangaroo. Peter Pierce in his study of the Australian lost child story, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety, argues that the lost child story reflects the white settlers’ distrust of their new country and its aboriginal inhabitants.

This paper compares Australian lost child stories like “Dot and the Red Kangaroo” to lost child stories in other “settler colonies,” specifically Canada and South Africa. Canadian literature holds Catherine Parr Trail’s The Canadian Crusoes about two siblings who wander off from their parents’ cabin and are lost in the woods for an entire year, while South African literature contains the tale “Themba Comes to Town,” the violent tale of a naïve black country boy, Themba, traveling to stay with his adult brother in an unnamed South African city and getting lost along the way. This paper will draw upon cognitive theories of reader emotional response to literature to argue that these stories of lost children aid settler cultures in their management of guilt over the cultural violence of colonization. The lost child story provides one means, I will argue, for the projection of the violent behavior of the colonizer onto an Other or landscape. In Australian and Canadian literature, the appropriation of land and displacement of indigenous people to make way for settlement becomes recast in the lost child story into the white child being lost in a threatening alien landscape. In South African literature, the violence of apartheid becomes retold in a warning tale of the black child venturing from the Bantu reservation into the hostile city, where he is threatened by other black Africans, not by white South Africans. This paper aims through its comparative reading of these three texts to further the understanding of the complicated role literature plays in colonization and postcolonization.


Sorin Nastasia (University of North Dakota, Grand Forks ND): "A Postcolonial Analysis of Four Contemporary Romanian Films"

By examining Eastern Europeanness with the aid of a postcolonial theoretical framework, this essay positions the Eastern European as what Gayatri Spivak calls the “ultimate Other:” the Other to Occidentals as well as Orientals. Few scholars have approached Eastern Europe by means of postcolonial terms and concepts, since this space has seemed difficult to consider through a Third World versus First World opposition, or a colonized-colonizer relationship. I argue that viewing Eastern Europe through postcolonial lenses is necessary and productive: Eastern European countries have been constructed as a Third World of Europe, and Eastern Europeans have been directly or indirectly under the influence and control of many imperial forces.

This essay looks at Romania through postcolonial lenses: various parts of the territory of present-day Romania have been colonized in various ways by Greeks and Romans, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, Tsarist Russia and communist Soviet Union, the European Union and the United States; the population on this territory is marked by difference not only with the East and the West but also with its own region, since this population, of a Romance language and culture, is surrounded by people of Slavic languages and cultures. This essay employs several postcolonial concepts (that of the colonial scene including the adventurous journey and the exotic place, and that of the colonial encounter including the commercial exchange and the sexual intercourse) in the analysis of four recent Romanian films (Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Days and 2 Weeks, Catalin Mitulescu’s How I Spent the End of the World, Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, and Cristian Nemescu’s California Dreamin’). Thus, this essay provides opportunities for reflection on Orient and Occident, Third and First worlds, and Eastern Europeanness as ultimate Otherness.