How to Occupy the Real: Postcolonial Literatures Beyond Representation

In this dissertation I address the ways in which postcolonial authors from the Caribbean and the Maghreb, anglophone and Francophone such as Frankétienne, Edouard Glissant, Abdelkebir Khatibi M. Nourbese Philip and Dany Laferrière respond to a historical exclusion from the symbolic; an exclusion that affected and continues to affect colonial and postcolonial subjectivities. How is it possible, from the perspective of the colonized (non)subject, to express a (post)colonial experience? Is bearing witness to past colonial events possible when the constitution of the modern paradigm itself necessitated the erasure of such events? How does one project a voice that bears the possibility to be heard when the structural stability of language and communication—in other words, the “symbolic”—is secured by deafness to these voices? To examine these questions, I look at works of fiction (poetry, novels, spiral) that do not fit easily into a specific genre precisely because they experiment with literary forms of representation. Deploying strategies ordinarily viewed as negative, such as schizophrenia, disidentification and opacity, the authors of my corpus push language to its limits in order to express postcolonial traumatic experiences. Drawing on Lacan’s concept of the real, trauma studies, postcolonial theory and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, I demonstrate that they successfully “occupy the real:” their dismantling of traditional literary forms -- and sometimes of language itself -- questions western forms of representation and opens up an ethics of reading that demands the reader takes responsibility for the object of his or her gaze.