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Arts of the Impossible: Violence, Trauma, and Erasure in the Global South Nicole Marie Gervasio Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Nicole Marie Gervasio All rights reserved 2 ABSTRACT Arts of the Impossible: Violence, Trauma and Erasure in the Global South Nicole Marie Gervasio This dissertation examines how contemporary Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone literature from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia (1984-present) reconfigures historical archives to negotiate the ethics of representing state violence in repressive societies. I identify new literary forms politically conscious writers are devising to capture and contest human rights violations. Using an interdisciplinary decolonial feminist framework, I closely read works by Cristina Peri Rossi, Michael Ondaatje, M. NourbeSe Philip, Edwidge Danticat, Boubacar Boris Diop, and Roberto Bolaño— a diverse set of postcolonial and post-dictatorship writers never before compared in comparative literature. I call these writers’ endeavors to reframe traumatic history “arts of the impossible,” which defy the alleged unrepresentability of collective trauma to secure justice and forestall impunity. I compare representations of wide- ranging atrocities including forced disappearance, slavery, genocide, and femicide— crimes exemplifying what I term “ontological erasure.” At stake in ontological erasure are not simply lost perspectives from multiply marginalized victims, like women and queer people of color, but the very possibility of citizenship and the will to dissent state recognition enables. To resist the threats posed by the authorization of these crimes to political freedom, these writers, I argue, reinvent evidentiary forms historically suppressed by authoritarian states, including court transcripts, testimonies, forensic reports, and national archives. These authors’ innovations push the boundaries of what counts as “evidence” in acts of state violence that are uniquely determined by erasure; they also imagine new methods for remembering past atrocities without compromising recognition for stigmatized minorities in the future. Table of Contents List of figures.....…………………………………………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgments………….…………………………………………………………………..................iii Introduction: Ontological Erasure & State Violence in the Archives of Collective Trauma .............. 1 A Decolonial Feminist Framework for Reading Violence in the Global South .................................... 11 Decentering the Holocaust: Colonialism as the Root of Ontological Erasure ...................................... 17 The Limits of Evidentiary Forms, Authority, and State Power in the Archives ................................... 23 Chapter 1: The National Archive and the People’s Imagination: Reconstructing Forced Disappearance in Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost . 33 Embodiments of Erasure: Vercingétorix and Sailor as Victims of Forced Disappearance in Uruguay and Sri Lanka, via Nazi Germany ...................................................................................................... 40 The Creation of Counter-Factual Archives in Ondaatje’s and Peri Rossi’s Novels .............................. 53 Gender, Identity, and Power in Peri Rossi’s Reassembled Archives ................................................... 57 Identifying a “Representative” Victim as an Art of the Impossible in Anil’s Ghost ............................. 71 Conclusion: How to Reframe the Archives on Forced Disappearance................................................. 88 Chapter 2: Breaking Law and Language from Inside the System: Reforming Notes from the King’s Bench in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! ................................................................................................. 90 Zong! in Context: Historical Notes from the Eighteenth-Century Archive .......................................... 97 Which Archive to Reform? The Deferral of Abolitionist Voices in Zong! ........................................ 103 Reacting to Sharp and the Law: Anti-Narrative Interventions on Voice, Being, and Personhood ...... 111 “Ruth” as Counter to Historical “Truth” about Slavery in English Law and Language ...................... 122 Conclusion: How to Deal with the Ebora of Slave Massacre in History ........................................... 132 Chapter 3: Genocide, Gender, and Testimony for the Future in Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi : le livre des ossements and Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones ................................................. 141 Genocide and Ontological Erasure: A Theoretical Framework ......................................................... 152 Decomposing Institutions: Heteropatriarchy, the Church, and the State in a Decolonial Feminist Framework of Refusal ..................................................................................................................... 159 A Refusal to Return: Women’s Anti-Reproductivity and the Question of a Future............................ 175 Silencing or Speaking for the Other: The Trouble with Testimonial Forms ...................................... 182 Conclusion: Is There Hope for a Future? .......................................................................................... 187 Chapter 4: The Banality of Evil: Forensic Reports and Hate Speech in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and Los sinsabores del verdadero policía ................................................................................................... 194 The Futility of the Forensic Report as Evidence for Feminicidio ...................................................... 214 Hate Speech as Vernacular: Women’s Difficulty with Speaking Truth to Power .............................. 219 The Internalization of State Repression: Amalfitano’s Uncanny Homophobia in 2666 and Los sinsabores del verdadero policía ..................................................................................................... 227 Conclusion: Bolaño’s Reinvented Patriarch and His Legacy against/of Fascism ............................... 238 Coda: On Resistance to Erasure ....................................................................................................... 244 Works Cited ....................................................................................................................................... 252 i List of Figures Figure 1.1. Hieronymous Bosch, “The Ship of Fools” (1490-1500)…………………………….60 Figure 1.2. Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter (1957)…………………………………….68 Figure 1.3. Helmut Berger in The Damned (1969)……………………………………………....68 Figure 1.4. Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel (1930)…………………………………………68 Figure 1.5. Dolores del Rio………………………………………………………………………68 Figure 2.1. Example of Granville Sharp’s handwritten footnotes on page 48 of the transcript he commissioned for the Zong trials (May 21, 1783)…....………………………………...106 Figure 2.2. Example of Manuscript Revisions from a Draft of a Letter to Jacob Bryant (October 19, 1772)………………………………………………………………………..............136 Figure 4.1. Photo of Discarded Clothes Near a Mass Grave by Brent Gundlock (Nov. 2014)...203 Figure 4.2. Photo of a Skull, Bones and a Girl’s Dress Near the City of Iguala by Brent Gundlock (Nov. 2014)……………………………………………………………………………..204 Figure 4.3. Photo of unknown femicide victim in early 1990s Ciudad Juárez, México; no date, and no author, posted to Borderland Beat website……………………………………..204 Figure 4.4. Photo of Elina Chauvet’s installation, “Zapatos Rojos,” at Castle Square, Turin, Italy, by Franco Baldan; each pair of shoes represents a victim of femicide in Mexico whose murderer has not been brought to justice……………………………………………….207 Figure 5.1. "Portrait of Sylvia Elena" by Swoon, an art installation supported by the Yerba Buena Cultural Association in San Francisco………………………………………………….250 ii Acknowledgments Many mentors, advisors, and colleagues have influenced this dissertation. First to thank is my partner, Celia Turner, who has seen me through unexpected achievements as well as sundry anxieties and disappointments. Her faith in my intellect and unrelenting, loving support have reinforced my confidence throughout the last four years. Academically and professionally, I have benefited tremendously from the close attention of my dissertation committee in Columbia’s English and Comparative Literature Department. I am especially grateful to my sponsor, Marianne Hirsch. Her seminar on the novel and feminist theory in my first semester of graduate school evolved into seven years of assiduous mentorship and genuine intellectual regard. The transnational network of feminist scholars, activists and artists from Turkey, Chile, and the U.S. whom she introduced me to through Women Mobilizing Memory, a working group at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, provided the groundwork for my dissertation; since 2014, my work has flourished in light of their cross- cultural feedback. In particular, graduate seminars I took with two group members—Judith Butler’s “Violence and Ethics” at Columbia and Diana Taylor’s “Embodiment and Performance” at New York University— contributed indelibly to the interdisciplinary, theoretical underpinnings of this project. My second reader, Brent Hayes Edwards, has also contributed invaluably to my thinking on comparative approaches to decoloniality; I am immensely grateful for