Book Review: Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing

Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing by Donna McCormack is a literary studies book organised into five chapters. Throughout, McCormack's approach is deliberately interdisciplinary, as she splices literary analyses, postcolonial studies, queer studies, trauma studies and disability studies. Alongside this approach, her thematic focus is on performativity (via Judith Butler, J.L. Austin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Andrew Parker), ethics, non-linear time (which she attributes to disability, postcolonial and queer narratives), and the creative, multisensory and embodied forms that arise when bearing witness to trauma in what she calls ‘queer postcolonial narratives’. The latter, which are at the centre of the book's textual analysis, consist of four postcolonial novels: Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'Enfant de Sable, Tahar Ben Jelloun's La Nuit Sacrée and Anne-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees.

This is a dense and multilayered book; within each chapter, textual analysis is carefully foregrounded alongside the ethical and embodied role of the witness. Moreover, in order to frame the overall book's impetus, McCormack poses in the introduction, entitled ‘Embodied memories’, a key question: ‘Why is the body used to communicate with and to demand responses from others?’ (p. 2). While this question links all subsequent chapters, it also poses a deliberate challenge to approaches, such as Homi Bhabha's (2004), that reduce embodiment—especially queer subjects and queer bodies—to metaphors, symbols and national allegories (p. 186).

Indeed, McCormack proceeds to demonstrate that such approaches are bound up with a ‘normalising impulse’ (p. 19), which erases the materiality and multisensory experience of the body. Most crucially for the book's critical arc, McCormack argues that this erasure forecloses the recognition that ‘bearing witness to trauma is an embodied event’ (p. 27). This specific idea of ‘an embodiment event’ is central to the role of bearing witness as a non-institutional role, and to foreground this complex and paradoxical role, McCormack paraphrases Parker and Sedgewick (1995): ‘Parker and Sedgewick highlight a paradox that I would argue is central to the act of witnessing: the silent speech act of the witness’ (p. 25). As we proceed beyond the introduction into Chapter 1, McCormack elaborates on the role of the witness via the idea of silence as a powerful political tool (p. 42), and how this power is directly tied to embodiment.

Alongside silence as a potentially powerful political tool and bearing witness to trauma as an embodied event, McCormack is also interested in the uncritical support that has been given to the idea of performance/repetition as subversive. In order to contextualise this specific critique, she foregrounds Sara Ahmed's analyses of how performance/repetition has been too readily celebrated as subversive; McCormack further argues that ‘[b]y working with theorists of performativity, I have sought to tease out a central node in the performative structure of power: the endless repetitive process of witnessing’ (p. 190). McCormack also clarifies that the process of witnessing goes beyond the recognition of ‘individual will’ (p. 191), and that for her this recognition is an important rejoinder to critics who too readily interpret Butler's (2004) conception of performativity as automatically subversive.

The most substantial contributions of this book are its ambitious interdisciplinary framings alongside the nuanced textual analysis of both more well-known (Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night) and lesser-known (Jelloun's L'Enfant de Sable) postcolonial literary texts. McCormack also aptly critiques how the focus on national and cultural allegories in some postcolonial literary criticism, including Homi Bhabha's (2004), has distracted from focussing on bodies, especially disability, queerness and difference (p. 6). Moreover, McCormack's choice of texts is not restricted to anglophone texts but extends to francophone texts as well. This is important because of how postcolonial studies is often equated with anglophone literature and culture. Thus McCormack readily sets the scene for more rigorous comparative analyses of postcolonial texts beyond anglophone-centred approaches. Lastly, McCormack's deft attention to how the material exceeds the symbolic; her attuned readings of the power of literary texts in bearing witness to trauma; and her analysis of how art and, more broadly, embodied language and experience facilitate possibilities that can exceed the ‘normalising impulse’, offer much critical food for thought.

In conclusion, this is an ambitious and incisive book that will interest those who are keen to follow new directions in gender and feminist studies, especially given that McCormack's approach to gender within the overall book reflects how she sees violence as enmeshed in ethics and politics. McCormack aptly summarises this in writing that her book proposes ‘[a] theory of embodied reading that attempts to decolonize normativity’ (p. 186) and though decolonising cannot be imagined or enacted by any one book, this volume offers a robust engagement with how decolonising connects to contemporary debates in feminist, postcolonial and gender studies.