This paper explores the contribution of Fred D'Aguiar's novel Children of Paradise (2014) to the conflicted memorialization of the 1978 Jonestown tragedy, where over 900 American citizens lost their lives in the Amazonian interior of Guyana. I argue that in his fictional revisitation of the massacre, D'Aguiar explores Jonestown as a multidirectional site of memory. By placing the tragedy in a historical and conceptual continuum that encompasses different forms of subjugation, including colonialism and its legacy in the post-independence Caribbean, but also totalitarianism and the Nazi rule, the author gives Jonestown a global resonance that enlarges its significance, challenges understandings of it as a historical anomaly, and enhances the humanity of its victims, revealing linkages between seemingly disparate developments and memories. In my discussion I will draw on the theoretical insights provided by Michael Rothberg, Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, among others.
Discourses of cultural pluralism in literature, cinema and art today prove that inter-ethnic relations in Europe are moving towards, and in some spaces have already achieved, a spontaneous conviviality, in spite of the presence of racism and social injustice. Though the focus will be on the long-standing British multicultural experience, attention will also be paid to the case of Spain, a much younger country of migration. The specific histories of migration of these countries will also be tackled.Migration, diasporic or transcultural processes which have conditioned the lives of millions of people in Europe have made it almost impossible to connect their identity to a specific and unitary location. In this context, the question 'who am I?' needs to be asked not only in connection to one's roots, which are often found in different continents, but also in relation to one's routes. The postmodern celebration of movement, travel, and rootlessness as alternative processes of identity formation has opened up unending possibilities for the de/construction of old subjectivities, once defined in relation to national and cultural attachments which no longer prove stable and valid. Likewise, the capacity of many individuals to develop a sense of identity precisely because of not being linked to a specific location or because several places serve them simultaneously as points of reference has proved a useful tool for the recognition of hybrid identities and cultural formations developed in this large contact zone which Europe has become. Quoting Rosi Braidotti (1994), Suárez Lafuente highlights, in La historia espacial en la novela inglesa contemporánea [The history of space in the contemporary English novel] (2007), 'that the nomadic subject is formed by various axes becoming a narrative entity and a political recreation who can surpass different categories and levels of experience diluting, at the same time, the limits of difference without burning the norm' (2007, p. 192). Critical theory and literature become the natural space where the nomadic subject becomes an entity who un/identifies itself in order to be identified. This allows the nomadic subject to negotiate all the possible norms of social implementation of these new positions of the postmodern subject. As Suárez Lafuente also argues, it was Zygmunt Baumann
New developments in the field of youth studies are calling for a reorientation of discourses of adolescence away from developmental tropes of transition, crisis, and dysfunction, and towards a more fluid sociocultural framework. Meg Rosoff's acclaimed novel How I Live Now (2004) achieves a balance that transcends the pitfalls of developmentalism and gestures towards a sociological model of adolescence. In this novel, key developmental ideas such as risk, vulnerability and liminality are not the province of the young characters, but are reframed as the defining features of the dystopic society they inhabit. Rosoff's critical revision of dominant ideas about adolescence is facilitated by her fluid use of different literary traditions ranging from adolescent realism and evacuation fiction to dystopia.
Aminatta Forna's novel The Hired Man, on post-war Croatia, attests to her continued interest in transitional, post-conflict societies where mass atrocity and human rights violations such as forced disappearance and ethnic cleansing have taken place. Drawing on the conceptual framework of transitional justice and memory studies, this paper argues that the novel deepens and extends the concerns of post-conflict fiction in two main ways. Firstly, it explores the role of ordinary individuals as agents of restorative justice. The actual restoration of the house at the centre of the narrative transforms the building into a permanent site of memory that challenges collective amnesia and reminds the town of a history that should never repeat itself. Secondly, the narrative provides a valuable illustration of Rothberg's notion of implication, foregrounding a model of indirect responsibility for historical injustice that problematises the figure of the naïve outsider. The use of situational irony to enhance the theme of the indestructibility of the past will also be addressed.
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