McGONEGAL, Julie, Imagining Justice. The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation, Montréal / Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009, 233 p.
ISBN 077353458X
RÉSUMÉ
Discourses of forgiveness and reconciliation have emerged as powerfulscripts for interracial negotiations in states struggling with thelegacies of colonialism. While such discourses can obscure or evenperpetuate existing power relations, they can also encourageremembrance, reformulate notions of justice, and ultimately bring aboutsocial transformation.
Drawing on critical and theoreticalmaterial by thinkers as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon,Mahatma Ghandi, and Julia Kristeva, Julie McGonegal supplementsindigenous models and approaches with those produced within EuroAmerican discourse. In the process, she develops an understanding offorgiveness and reconciliation based on the interventive power ofliterature. Through insightful readings of four novels, McGonegaldemonstrates the ways in which literature can create the conditionsthat make processes of postcolonial reconciliation possible.
The first book to approach the political demands for reconciliationfrom the perspective of postcolonial literary criticism and theory,Imagining Justice demonstrates that reading can have potentiallyradical social and political effects. While the primary focus is onliterary texts, the issues at stake are germane to historians,political scientists, theologians, and sociologists.
TABLE DES MATIÈRES
Acknowledgments vi
Preface ix
Introduction Writing Wrongs: Postcolonial Literature and the (Im)possibility of Forgiveness and Reconciliation 3
1 Horizons of Justice: Notes toward a Theory of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation 24
2 Unsettling the Settler Postcolony: Uncanny Pre-Occupations in David Malouf's Remembering Babylon 59
3 Vigils amid Violence: Mourning the Dead and the Disappeared in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost 86
4 The Future of Racial Memory: Redressing the Past in Joy Kogawa's Obasan and Itsuka 111
5 The Agonistics of Absolution: Responsibility and the Right of Grace in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace 147
Conclusion 179
Epilogue 186
Notes 191
Bibliography 214
Index 229
BIOGRAPHIE
Julie McGonegal is a SSHRC postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Tasmania, Australia.