The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress

The authors studied in this volume represent a Francophone archipelago unfamiliar to any mapmaker, but drawn together through their use of narrators who are survivors and, sometimes, inflictors, of unspeakable acts of violence. These authors, then, Mireille D. Rosello argues, repair trauma through the act of writing. The reparative narratives introduced here require that readers be prepared to accept that healing belongs to a whole realm of potential outcomes—and that exposure and denunciation do not exhaust the victim’s range of possibilities. Rosello contends that this context-specific, yet repeating, pattern constitutes a response to our contemporary understanding of both globalized and extremely localized types of traumatic memories.

Mireille D. Rosello is chair of the Program of Comparative Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her many books include Postcolonial Hospitality and France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters.