Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: nostalgia, ethics, and contemporary Anglophone literature
- 1 Narratives of return: locating ethics in the age of globalization
- 2 Nostalgia and narrative ethics in Caribbean literature
- 3 “Loss was in the order of things”: recalling loss, reclaiming place in Native American fiction
- 4 Refiguring national character: the remains of the British estate novel
- 5 Appeasing an embittered history: trauma and nationhood in the writings of Achebe and Soyinka
- Conclusion: nostalgia and its futures
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Nostalgia and narrative ethics in Caribbean literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: nostalgia, ethics, and contemporary Anglophone literature
- 1 Narratives of return: locating ethics in the age of globalization
- 2 Nostalgia and narrative ethics in Caribbean literature
- 3 “Loss was in the order of things”: recalling loss, reclaiming place in Native American fiction
- 4 Refiguring national character: the remains of the British estate novel
- 5 Appeasing an embittered history: trauma and nationhood in the writings of Achebe and Soyinka
- Conclusion: nostalgia and its futures
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We need, therefore, a kind of parallel history of, let us say, victimisation, which would counter the history of success and victory. To memorize the victims of history – the sufferers, the humiliated, the forgotten – should be a task for all of us at the end of this century.
– Paul Ricoeur, “Memory and Forgetting”One of the most disturbing consequences of colonization could well be this notion of a single History, and therefore of power, which has been imposed on others by the West. […] Because the Caribbean notion of time was fixed in the void of an imposed nonhistory, the writer must contribute to reconstituting its tormented chronology[.]
– Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected EssaysThe last chapter concluded with a rather ambivalent claim. If the longing for lost or imagined “homeplaces” is crucial to ethical insight in Beloved, Black Dogs, and The Unbelonging, it also threatens to promote essentialistic visions of community. Sethe's longing for the community once associated with the Clearing enables her to recommit herself to a new relationship with Paul D, but it previously led her to isolate herself from the outside world in an effort to create a homogeneous community for Denver, Beloved, and herself. The ambivalence of nostalgia in Morrison's text points to a more general theoretical problem facing the authors in this study: how to critique imperialist narratives without reinforcing their philosophical categories or biases.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel , pp. 53 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005