Queer Postcolonial Space: Forging Ethical Practices Out of Violence in Shani Mootoo’s Literary Works

This article explores the potentiality of literature to produce ethical ways of belonging. Through an exploration of the safe space that emerges in Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night, this article suggests that a notion of self-reflexive responsibility is one possible way to forge non-violent bodily and spatial boundaries. This ethical way of existing and reading comes into being through the imaginary queer postcolonial space of the novel. The direct relation between ethics and hope for the subject positions in Cereus Blooms at Night suggests there is hope for the reader to begin to produce ethical encounters with texts, bodies and spaces