The interrogative impulse of this panel emerges from questions about colonialism and its violent imprints on the mind, body, culture, and environment of the colonized subject. We ask: How can we begin to disentangle the knots between colonial social regimes and colonized consciousness and unconsciousness and pave the way for a new form of decolonization that acknowledges the volatility of racial, gendered, and sexual identities and equations? Scholars of postcolonial, ethnic, and decolonial studies have long been preoccupied with the blurriness between visible affects and invisible violence. Thinking about grief, Anne Cheng in The Melancholy of Race claims that we have to comprehend racial grief as not just a consequence of racism but also the very foundation of racial identity and identification. Neetu Khanna in The Visceral Logics of Decolonization argues that it is crucial to turn to the embodied experiences of the colonized subject to account for “the unfinished project of decolonization” (1). These thinkers pose vital questions about the longue durée of colonial history and postcolonial violence, thereby offering us a new analytic to theorize trauma, erasure, and excess.

This panel brings together four presenters from different countries, universities, and ranks with an aim to unpack the affect-violence problematic from diverse historical and cultural perspectives. Each presentation will be 13 mins long which leaves sufficient time for my introduction and conclusion and around 18 mins for audience discussion. We will begin with Moinak Banerjee’s paper which puts reportage and photographs in conversation to map the liberation movement in East Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh. Banerjee considers the Pakistani journalist Anthony Mascarenhas’ The Rape of Bangladesh and selected photographs by the Bangladeshi photographer Rashid Talukder to show how witnessing is a modern transformation of the realist aesthetic. Drawing on theories of critical realism and non-fiction, Banerjee underlines a politico-aesthetic mode of witnessing that sheds light on the violent foundations of South Asian postcolonial nation-states such as Bangladesh.

Taking this robust train of thought further, Professor Philip Broadbent offers an interpretation of Yoko Tawada’s film-novel, The Naked Eye. Broadbent reads Tawada’s novel through Anne Cheng’s theories of “ornamentalism” and “the yellow woman” and argue that Tawada’s protagonist’s Asiatic femininity is not defined epidermally, but as a body that is adorned, a body that is discursively created. Broadbent relies on Foucault’s concept of techniques of the self to contend that the only way for the protagonist to establish her own subjectivity and inclusion is, problematically, through an erasure of the “yellow body” that defines her, a feat she accomplishes (somewhat) at the end of the novel. For Broadbent, this self-as constituted is both a political and ethical imperative. Departing from critics who have argued that the protagonist loses her subjectivity, Broadbent demonstrates that her subjectivity was already erased before she left Vietnam.

Dr. Maïté Marciano’s paper will take us to France and Guadeloupe through an analysis of Marie Ndiaye's novel Rosie Carpe. The novel unfolds around Rosie, who, following a distressing experience in France, returns to Guadeloupe with her son in search of her estranged and nearly legendary brother, Lazare. Marciano states that Ndiaye's deliberate use of anti-cathartic affects unveils the silent currents of invisible violence and intergenerational trauma, echoing intertextually through the character of Lazare. Building on Barthes’s Lazarean literature and drawing from Michael Rothberg's multidirectional memory, Marciano argues that Ndiaye weaves together transnational and intergenerational narratives of trauma to reveal the commonalities between the legacies of colonialism and fascism across the twentieth century as well as their persisting effects enduring to this day.

The last presentation will be by Adanna Ogbonna-Oluikpe on Thabile Shange’s novel In the Midst of it All which zooms in on the historical tensions between Nigerians and black South Africans. Ogbonna-Oluikpe explores fear and related affects to highlight how racialized perceptions that stem from external forces impinge on the body as affects. By close reading the language and actions of the characters in the text, she describes fear in its intangible state as the racialized affect that shapes violence. For Ogbonna-Oluikpe, her analysis creates room conceptualizing an affect-based relationality that brings together ideas of race and nationality as well as perception and experience.

This panel will stage a tricontinental critique of colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial violence and provide the audience with an alternative affective map to conceptualize racial, national, and gendered grammars of difference. We look forward to learning from and expanding upon each other’s knowledge of the affect-violence problematic which continues to unsettle normative binaries of identity and power in novel ways.