Oct 29, 2016 | 10:40 AM - 12:10 PM | LOFT 1

Mr. Matthew Dunleavy, MA (current PhD student)

“a portion of our fellow-creatures may become the subject of property”: Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts and the Unnatural...

James Walvin’s The Zong: A Massacre, The Law, and the End of Slavery reports on the events leading to the 1783 Gregson v. Gilbert insurance case. Although Walvin has done his due diligence in trying to understand the truth of the events, the exact details of what happened on the Zong are unknowable; as Walvin himself reminds readers, “it is impossible to be confident about what was happening on board the Zong.”  Lord Chief Justice Mansfield’s appellate court decision is all that remains of the event; we do not have witness testimonies, the ship’s log, or even the report from the case at trial that ruled in favour of Gregson. With no slaves presented as witnesses during the insurance case, The Zong is historical speculation, at best. In Feeding the Ghosts, Fred D’Aguiar fictionalizes the same missing narrative of events leading to the Gregson v. Gilbert case with a novel that defies generic classification. D’Aguiar’s novel, could be considered historical fiction, but it does not quite fit the expectations of this genre. While it follows some mimetic narrative practices, D’Aguiar includes numerous antimimetic elements that “violate mimetic expectations and the practices of realism, and defy the conventions of existing, established genres.” By including antimimetic episodes and characters to create an unnatural narrative, D’Aguiar offers a representation of collective trauma on behalf of the silenced subaltern of the transatlantic slave trade.

I argue that, to see this collective trauma, Feeding the Ghosts must be viewed as an “unnatural historical novel.” In short, D’Aguiar does not provide readers with a generic historical novel, but uses the genre as a base to represent mass trauma and its multi-generational consequences in order to refute the idea that the complexities of the slave trade can be easily surmised by orthodox non-fiction history books or established historical fiction practices.

Mrs. Mary Hood, Master's

Unseeing the Truth: Collective Blindness Towards State Terror in Two Uruguayan Detective Novels

My paper will explore the ways in which collective consciousness about the dictatorship and State terror are reflected in two Uruguayan detective novels, Igual que una sombra  by Omar Prego and El crimen de Toledo by Hugo Fontana. In both novels we can see the intricate and complex ways that truth. lies, and memory--both personal and collective--are analyzed and questioned by the authors. In the first novel, Igual que una sombra, Prego shows Montevideo as two different worlds, two concentric circles that never come together. The ease in which people are able to ignore what is going on right in front of them is unsettling, which is exactly what Prego hopes to evoke in the reader--the question of collective complicity and ignorance in Uruguay during those tumultuous years. In the second novel, El crimen de Toledo, the author uses the town of Toledo, Uruguay, for the backdrop of a murder and we see a different way in which the subjects of truth and memory are shown. The author explores the dichotomy of being asleep versus being awake and I will explore how that relates to the collective consciousness not only of the town of Toledo, but Uruguay in general.

In my paper I will talk about the different ways in which the two novels explore the idea of truth, lies, and memory. How can we trust our own memories? What is the purpose of shared History or mythology and why is it necessary for a Nation or a city to construct one? And lastly, how and why are the characters in both novels able to unsee the truth that is right in front of them?

Ms. Rebecca Anderson, Master of Arts in Literary Studies

Visual Text in Process & Visual Text as Progress: The Media(tion) of Loss in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For

Instances of the spectrality of the past in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For proliferate in the text; within all four families, the Vu family, the Chiarelli’s, the Bernard family, and the Barker family, there is the sense that what happened to one person, what they experienced in one moment of their lifetime, does not come back around necessarily but, rather, never leaves the affected person in the first place. Consequently, the affect of this event is transferred, transmitted, and transposed on to the subsequent generation. This paper examines the following avenues connected to trauma in Brand’s novel: first, the visual texts of personally experienced as well as inherited trauma. In other words, I investigate the manufactured embodiments used by Cam and Tuyen to mediate the memory and incurred postmemory of the loss of Quy. Second, the spaces used to house these visual texts. In other words, I consider the forum used by Cam to archive and by Tuyen to arbitrate the trauma incurred because of Quy’s failed re(dis)covery.

I propose that Brand’s text offers the positions of curator and creator as uniquely tasked to suture past trauma to present moment in the space of the archive. Specifically, I explore the media(tion) of the past relative to visual rememory or the recall of a traumatic memory, as well as to remembering or the retrieval of a past experience. Subsequently, I consider the space and affect of installation art. In particular, I investigate the transmission of affect, the creation of prosthetic memory, and the inevitable ephemerality specific to this type of memory media(tion). My discussion, then, considers the imbricated process of remembrance presented by memory, the attempt to record it, and the eventual forgetting of it.

Biographies

Matthew Dunleavy

Matthew Dunleavy is a PhD student in English Literature at York University (Toronto, Ontario). His work examines the gender politics among the inhabitants, philanthropists, and journalists of the Late-Victorian/Early-Edwardian East-End London slums. His most recent article "Angels of the Slum: Women and Slumming in Margaret Harkness's In Darkest London," co-authored with Dr. Brooke Cameron (Queen's University) was published in Papers on Language and Literature 15.2.

Mary Hood

Mary Hood graduated with her Master's in Spanish and Certificate in Latin American Studies from Georgia State University. Her research interests include Contemporary Latin American and Iberian Literature and Gender Studies with a special interest in post-dictatorship Southern Cone literature and film with a focus in Uruguayan and Argentine detective fiction.

Rebecca Anderson

Rebecca Anderson is a PhD Candidate in the English Language and Literature Department at the University of Waterloo. She completed her BA (English Literature; French Studies) and MA (Literary Studies) at UWaterloo. Her research interests include new media art, memory studies, and adaptation theory. In particular, her current research investigates how memory is archived by and recalled with artistic mediums, as well as how a traumatic memory can be navigated using the affordances of artistic process. In addition to her academic pursuits, she works on promotional material for The Games Institute at UWaterloo, enjoys playing Scrabble, and has begun training for a try-a-triathlon.

Selected Conference Presentations:

“Caveat Emptor: On Farming Practices and Farming Politics in Waterloo Region”. Coded Bodies: XDM Annual Exhibition. Critical Media Lab, Kitchener, ON. April 2016.

“Casting the Feminine: On Being a Woman in the Digital World”. Coded Bodies: XDM Annual Exhibition. Critical Media Lab, Kitchener, ON. April 2016.

“Hitting the Necessities: Fostering and Securing Access to Material Provisions and Nutrient Dense Produce in Region of Waterloo Women’s Shelters”. Waterloo Women: Ideas, Makers, Innovators Conference. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON. March 2016.

“‘The trees leaned over them and listened’: Middle-earth as Character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The         Hobbit and in Peter Jackson’s Film Adaptation The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”. NYC Tolkien Conference. Baruch College, New York City, NY. June 2015.

“Mapping Medievalism: The Cartographic Commitment and Architectural Structure of Bree in Turbine’s The Lord of the Rings Online”. Immerse Medievalism and Video Games Symposium. UC Davis, Davis, CA. May 2015.

“The Function of Middle-Earth’s Flora: A Discussion of Plant Life in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”. Tolkien Reading Day Symposium. The Games Institute, Waterloo, ON. March 2015.