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Sam Durrant. Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee,Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison. Albany: State U of New York P, 2004. 142 pp.
In a taut 117 pages of text, Sam Durrant argues that in our collective postcolonial present, narrative is necessarily a work of mourning, and mourning is without closure. Thus, in this context, the distinction between mourning and melancholia that Freud attempted to make early in his career cannot hold. To explicate this process of postcolonial mourning, Durrant reads J. M. Coetzee's novels The Life and Times of Michael K, Foe, and Waiting for the Barbarians; Wilson Harris's novella Palace of the Peacock; and Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. Although these literary authors provide Durrant the means to organize his chapters, Walter Benjamin's angel of history and Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx also haunt these pages and become themselves objects as well as tools of interpretation. They are only the most salient figures from the rich philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary critical context that inform Durrant's thinking.
In the interest of summary, I present his argument as one for mourning without closure, but summary should not be allowed to blunt the subtlety that Durrant brings to these poststructuralist insights nor flatten the peaks of his prose. He begins by defining the features that draw the work of Coetzee, Harris, and Morrison into one study under the rubric of postcolonial narratives. While they memorialize colonial histories, he asserts, they also "share a common horizon of emancipation, one that exceeds specific historical instances of liberation," such as laws and elections. Their work is "literary witnessing [that hopes to] bring into being a truly pos(colonial form of community" (2). The hopeful leap from literary witnessing to just community is always difficult, even for the most athletic mind, but the metaphor of the "common horizon of emancipation," exceeding specific history, is one that serves his deconstructive argument well, especially when reread retrospectively. For he means to "contest [what he considers] the mainstream understanding of postcolonialism as a recuperative, historicizing project and argue for the centrality of a deconstructive, anti-historicist ethics of remembrance" (7). Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, as well as Derrida, Benjamin, and others have established this ethical tradition overtime. Durrant adds to it a...