The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature

This volume explores the possibilities and potentialities of “negative” affect in postcolonial literature and literary theory, featuring work on postcolonial studies, First Nations studies, cognitive cultural studies, cognitive historicism, reader response theory, postcolonial feminist studies, and trauma studies. The chapters of this work investigate negative affect in all its types and dimensions: analyses of the structures of feeling created by socio-political forces; assemblages and alliances produced by negative emotion; enactive interrelationships of emotion and environment; and the ethical implications of emotional response, to name a few. It seeks to rebrand “negative” emotions as productive forces which can paradoxically confer pleasure, agential power, and social progress through literary representation. Cover Endorsements Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Contributors Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction SECTION I: Theoretical Lineaments: Negative Emotions and the Affordances of Fiction 1. Ontology of Diasporic Emotions in If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi by Neel Patel 2. The Productivity of “Negative Emotions” through Shock-Value Fiction: The Case of Australian Indigenous Writers 3. Negative Emotions in the Light of Neuropsychoanalysis: The Generative Matrix of Witi Ihimaera’s Multigenerational Saga 4. First-Hand Experiences of the Transformation of Traumatic Memories and Cascading Emotions in the Creative Writing Process 5. Managing COVID-19 Anger and Anxiety: The Quarantine Train and the Affective Functions of Online Poetry SECTION II: Emotions of Loss 6. Representing and Resisting Maternal Melancholy in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and The Joys of Motherhood 7. Disaffection and Retrieved Agency in Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” 8. On Postcolonial Disappointment: Affect’s Formal Politics in Post-Transition Narrative from South Africa SECTION III: Emotions of Insecurity 9. “Solastalgia” as an Epistemic Approach: “A Map to the Next World,” “Averno,” and the Power of Negative Affect 10. “The Squeals and Groans Are the Same”: Horror and Subject Development in Sydney Bridge Upside Down 11. Fear in Indigenous Literatures of the Global South: The Poetry of Graciela Huinao and Ellen van Neerven 12. On Negative Emotions in Apocalyptic Cultural Memories: Literary Affects of Estrangement in “Postcolonial” Acadie SECTION IV: Emotions of Discontent 13. The Transformative Power of Rage in Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men 14. On the Other Side of Anger: Nature, Ecology, and Culture in Rushdie’s Shalimar, the Clown 15. Negative Affect to Positive Resistance: Indignation in Césaire’s Une Tempête Index