Suffering may be minimally defined as the sense of the disintegration of the self. This sense may be experienced as a continuing condition or as an imminent threat. In thinking about suffering we might minimally agree with what Aristotle says in The Poetics and the Nichomachean Ethics about the impediments toward articulating the self which he names as the loss of philia – both familial and friendly -- the loss of the comforts of citizenship, illness, the receipt of a barrage of bad news or the delay in the arrival of good news. Poverty, exile, the burdens of historic and continuing racial and cultural injuries, and political violence directly produce suffering in our own times. The affective correlatives of suffering are measurable in physical and emotional pain and existential doubt and in extreme circumstances can lead to a loss of the capacity to make ethically informed decisions and a loss of appetite for life itself. Suffering can thus define what it means to be human.

From the nineteenth century, what is taken to constitute suffering and the responses to it has also been addressed by philosophers such as Schlegel, Hegel, Nietzsche, while Freud, Lacan, Agamben and others have provided a wealth of new terms and perspectives with which to think about the concept. Even though suffering may be considered part of the general human condition, its causes and the perception of what it means have differed sharply in particular historical contexts. Spectacles of pain and suffering, amidst stark regimes of enslavement, confinement and correction, were once commonplace in many societies. Their replacements, that now include new forms of exploitation such as human trafficking, mass incarceration and other forms of sequestration in the name of national security force, and the refugee condition has renewed reflection upon the meanings of concepts such as slavery and its bearing on the concept of suffering. This session engages in the ongoing critical and conversation on the ethics, politics and literary representations of suffering rather than analyzing a particular social condition as represented in literature through an interdisciplinary lens such as legal, environmental or migration studies. Fiction, not literary tragedy, the perhaps more obvious genre, is central to our examination of the form and mode of representation of suffering as such.

The four papers by key postcolonial literary scholars are timely and urgent. Together they provide a critical lens on the ways in which an ethics and politics of suffering can come to bear on an interpretation of twentieth and twenty-first century fiction by postcolonial and writers of color writing from different historical, geographical and literary contexts. While there are four speakers we aim to speak briefly for about 10 minutes each to leave enough room for discussion. Two of the speakers will provide a more philosophical undertaking using the novel as a brief guide while the other two will hone in on a particular novel to discuss the idea and representation of suffering. Jeanne Marie Jackson’s paper will focus on the protean and prolific Zimbabwean writer Stanlake Samkange, best known for his historical novels leading up to that country's independence in 1980. However, his lesser-known work of African philosophy, Hunhuism or Ubuntuism shows how his search for a neutral, authoritative voice commensurate with Zimbabwe’s rapidly shifting configuration is a case study in being unwilling or unable to suffer “out loud” in times that seem to demand it. The talk suggests that Samkange's shift from a focus on events to a focus on ideas foregrounds the challenge of maintaining a posture of intellectual moderation in the face of two, ostensibly more timely and impassioned brands of narrativized suffering: the first, the literature of a more zealous African nationalism than Samkange’s own, and the second, the literature of “negative affect” or psychic fragmentation.

Ankhi Mukherjee’s talk will examine the symbolic overload of Antigone figurations in Hegel, Lacan, and Butler to study her strange reincarnations in postcolonial fiction, such as Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. Shamsie’s evocation of Antigone goes against the grain of Hegel’s reading of her as hypostatised law and Lacan’s deciphering in her actions the vicissitudes of Eros. Nor is the figure easily reducible to the claims of the non-normative family alone, as Butler famously argues. Like other works of postcolonial fiction before her, Shamsie foregrounds the raced body at the intersection of love and politics, society, faith and family: Antigone, here, is both timeless myth and a contingent redrawing of polity in the twenty-first century for the socially marginalised who seek cultural intelligibility.

Ato Quayson argues that while Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics explores the essential aspects of eudaimonia (the good life, happiness, living well, virtuous living) it leaves some prickly questions unanswered: Are there conditions under which the virtues might seem to conflict or contradict one another? And how about conditions in which a person has to make a choice between equally compelling options? This last question is answered in part in Bernard Williams's discussion of moral inconsistency and moral dilemma. His comments will illustrate the key concepts implied in Aristotle and Williams's different ethical accounts with reference to James Baldwin's short story "Sonny's Blues" and J.M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians.

Sangeeta Ray takes up the contemporary refugee novel. While much has been written about refugees and human rights in contemporary fiction less has been said about the forms fiction take when depicting the refugee condition as the contemporary human condition. The talk will provide a brief overview of two or three novellas (such as Signs Preceding The End of The World and the Gangster We are All Looking For) a peculiar genre in and of itself. It will then move to a close reading of a few passages of the novella A Story of a Brief Marriage which oxymoronically uses long realist, deeply punctuated sentences to depict uneven temporalities and subjecthood to capture one day in the life of a Sri Lankan refugee in a camp in Sri Lanka during the last months of the civil war.