Insurgent Testimonies
Witnessing Colonial Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature
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During the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, insurgencies erupted in imperial states and colonies around the world, including Britain’s. As Nicole Rizzuto shows, the writings of Ukrainian-born Joseph Conrad, Anglo-Irish Rebecca West, Jamaicans H. G. de Lisser and V. S. Reid, and Kenyan Ng gi wa Thiong’o testify to contested events in colonial modernity in ways that question premises underlying approaches in trauma and memory studies and invite us to reassess divisions and classifications in literary studies that generate such categories as modernist, colonial, postcolonial, national, and world literatures.
Departing from tenets of modernist studies and from methods in the field of trauma and memory studies, Rizzuto contends that acute as well as chronic disruptions to imperial and national power and the legal and extra-legal responses they inspired shape the formal practices of literatures from the modernist, colonial, and postcolonial periods.
“Insurgent Testimonies is a tremendously engaging, exciting, and innovative book. It is a timely intervention into postcolonial, trauma, and modernist literary studies that brings them together in unprecedented ways, while never glossing over the disciplinary and epistemological tensions between them. Rizzuto's dazzling readings of Conrad, West, de Lisser, Reid, and Ngugi are exemplary.”
Insurgent Testimonies wrenches Modernism out of its fixed description as an offshoot of the 'World' wars in their European definition. It wrenches postcolonial theory from its current focus on migration and deterritorialization. It redoes our thinking on testimony. Stunning readings of non-canonical texts by canonical authors, and significant texts away from the mainstream. Attention to historical detail combined with creative command of theory. An indispensable book.
A brilliant, committed reading of literary form as testimonial force produced by the historical damage of colonial violence and by the utopian horizons of anti-imperial insurgency. Rizzuto rescues the unstable mode of confessional writing from its associations with romantic self-expression and contemporary therapy culture, and even from the desire for moral clarity that we associate with commissions of truth, reconciliation, and reparation. Methodologically agile and interpretively nuanced, this book gives us a new geopolitics of intimate literary forms, redraws the map of twentieth-century periodization, and vindicates close reading as a vital tool for humanities research today.
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