Jean-François Vernay, Donald R. Wehrs, Isabelle Wentworth (éds.), 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.

Contents

List of Contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Donald R. Wehrs, Isabelle Wentworth, and Jean-François Vernay

I THEORETICAL LINEAMENTS: NEGATIVE EMOTIONS AND THE AFFORDANCES OF FICTION

Chapter 1: Ontology of Diasporic Emotions in If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi by Neel Patel / Angelo Monaco
Chapter 2: The Productivity of ‘Negative Emotions’ through Shock-Value Fiction: The Case of Australian Indigenous Writers / Jean-François Vernay and Jun Feng 
Chapter 3:  Negative Emotions in the Light of Neuropsychoanalysis: The Generative Matrix of Witi Ihimaera’s Multigenerational Saga / Alistair Fox
Chapter 4: First-Hand Experiences of the Transformation of Traumatic Memories and Cascading Emotions in the Creative Writing Process / Sue Woolfe and Liane Gabora
Chapter 5: Managing COVID-19 Anger and Anxiety: The Quarantine Train and the Affective Functions of Online Poetry / Hannah Pardey

II EMOTIONS OF LOSS

Chapter 6: Representing and Resisting Maternal Melancholy in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and The Joys of Motherhood / Sonya Andermahr
Chapter 7: Disaffection and Retrieved Agency in Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies”/ Donald R. Wehrs
Chapter 8: On Postcolonial Disappointment: Affect’s Formal Politics in Post-Transition Narrative from South Africa / Andrew van der Vlies

III EMOTIONS OF INSECURITY

Chapter 9: ‘Solastalgia’ as an Epistemic Approach: “A Map to the Next World,” “Averno,” and the Power of Negative Affect / Joydeep Chakraborty
Chapter 10: “The Squeals and Groans Are the Same”: Horror and Subject-Development in Sydney Bridge Upside Down / William Shaw
Chapter 11: Fear in Indigenous Literatures of the Global South: The Poetry of Graciela Huinao and Ellen van Neerven / Isabelle Wentworth
Chapter 12: On Negative Emotions in Apocalyptic Cultural Memories: Literary Affects of Estrangement in “Postcolonial” Acadie / Matthew Cormier  

IV EMOTIONS OF DISCONTENT

Chapter 13: The Transformative Power of Rage in Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men / Mélanie Heydari 
Chapter 14: On the Other Side of Anger: Nature, Ecology, and Culture in Rushdie’s Shalimar, the Clown / Lalita Pandit Hogan 
Chapter 15: Negative Affect to Positive Resistance: Indignation in Césaire’s Une Tempête / Bradley J. Irish

Index