Returning to Repair: Resolving Dilemmas of the Postcolonial Queer in Lawrence Scott's Aelred's Sin.
ARIEL 2004, July-Oct, 35, 3-4
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Publisher Description
We initially began this project thinking about ways in which postcolonial discourse and queer theory might speak to each other and produce, perhaps, a kind of synergy. (1) We were intrigued by the work of luminaries in each critical field which pointed to the need to deal more concretely and critically with the role of affect. In an interview in Race, Rhetoric and the Postcolonial, Homi Bhabha asserts that "in our contemporary moment, the politics of difference, the politics of community, the politics of communities of interest have such a deep and strong affective charge that we now have to understand the part that emotions, affects, play in the construction of community politics" (34). Similarly, in her preface to Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, Eve Sedgwick contends queer theory must shift from exclusively paranoid ways of knowing/reading to an emphasis on affective ways of knowing/reading. She urges a move beyond preoccupations with oppression and regulation to examine how affect enables repair: to recognize that many queers have been remarkably successful in (re)constructing painful experiences into objects capable of providing sustenance in the face of oppression. Taken together, these commentaries invite an exploration of possible ways of understanding the operations of affect in postcolonial and queer reading strategies. Initially our conversations centred on the similarities between Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Lawrence Scott's novel, Aelred's Sin. We also considered including Shyam Selvadurai's much-analyzed Funny Boy and Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here to develop our conceptual frames. However, while we had not envisioned a single-text focus, Aelred's Sin alone proved especially generative as we continued our explorations of affect and Sedgwick's notions of paranoid and reparative readings. Through our collaboration, we found Scott's text enabled us, from our respective theoretical positions, to assess how postcolonial and queer readings intersect with and contest one another in unexpected ways. Our focus, then, is not so much on achieving a reading of a particular, provocative text--in this case Scott's Aelred's Sin--but rather how the mutual interrogation of postcolonial and queer assumptions can produce both paranoid and reparative readings.