In 1939, Norbert Elias’ postulation of a “civilizing process” already hinged on an increasingly scandalized attitude towards excretory experience. The more censorious a population is of their fecal habits, the more civilized they become (Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation). Facing the need to justify their colonizing enterprise, Western countries have often referred to a similar argument. As a response to the white man’s philanthropic burden to teach good manners to their uncivilized ancestors, younger generations of artists depict the protagonists of their works farting, burping, bleeding, and defecating. While studies about disgust have mostly been concerned with psychology (Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Pascal Quignard), philosophy (Aurel Kolnai), sociology (Norbert Elias, Mary Douglas, William Miller) or legal structures (Martha Nussbaum), the prospective panelists of this session share the urge to identify what could be defined as a “Postcolonial Aesthetics of Disgust.” Following the recent lead of Neetu Khanna’s The Visceral Logics of Decolonization (Duke, 2020) and Mercedes López Rodríguez’s Sensing and Feeling the Other (forthcoming), we argue that decolonial undertakings stem not solely from mental transformations (Fanon and Ngugi wa Thiongo), but also from a physical reactivation of the five senses.
By focusing on disgust as the only emotion capable of awakening the five senses according to William Miller’s The Anatomy of Disgust (Harvard 1997), this session provides a stimulating follow-up to the MLA 2020’s presidential theme “Being human.” Usually presented as what most distinguishes human beings from bestiality, disgust has evolved from an argument used against the “uncivilized” and so-called animal Other to a provocative aesthetic tool that bridges affect and postcolonial theory in unforeseen ways. To better understand that evolution, we have selected three young scholars who will be presenting 18-minute papers to allow for a 15-minute discussion.
Greeshma Mohan will begin with the senses of smell and touch. Drawing attention to Upamanyu Chatterjee’s creation of an “olfactory and tactile apparatus” in his novels English August (1989), Weight Loss (2005), and The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian (2018), Mohan lays the groundwork for a fruitful discussion about the fear of contamination and pollution by the social Other. Building on Sianne Ngai’s Ugly feelings (Harvard 2005) and her concept of disgust as capable of diagnosing the “dilemma of social powerlessness,” Mohan looks at the forms that aversive emotions take in the context of caste and class hierarchies in postcolonial India.
Serena J. Rivera then shifts the focus to the disturbance provoked by the non-linear temporality and haunting imagery of Pedro Costa’s film Horse Money (2014), which focuses on the trauma Cabo Verdean migrants to Lisbon’s peripheral communities experienced in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution. Emphasizing Costa’s long pauses that center the images of non-hegemonic bodies and spaces as well as the dialogues between the living and the dead (and between temporalities) Rivera posits the film as offering a revised definition of Carolyn Korsmeyer’s functions of aesthetic disgust (Oxford 2011) in the historic portrayals of decolonization.
Finally, the last presentation about Ramón Esono Ebalé’s Obi’s Nightmares brings this session to a close with a multisensory graphic novel that arouses the five senses through an unusual active experience of reading, between repulsion and laughter. As Maude Havenne observes, blood, feces and mucus, along with morally unacceptable behaviors and practices, can become provocative decolonizing tools that force the readers to notice sights, touch, tastes, sounds, and smells of atrocities in Equatorial Guinea.
Just as disgust “never allows us to escape clean” (Miller 196), we hope that these presentations will stimulate the audience in new ways and encourage them to ask questions about the potential of a “Postcolonial Aesthetics of Disgust.”