Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture

Douglas Robinson

Table of Contents

Explore More
The author recommends the following links:

“Refugees’ Real Stories,” Amnesty International

Resources and Links from Center for Gender and Refugee Studies

“Decolonization,” Internet Modern History Sourcebook

“Intergenerational Trauma from a Mental Health Perspective” by Peter Menzies

Native American Center for Excellence

“Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture offers an important interventionist contribution to scholarship in the field of postcolonial studies. I am convinced by Douglas Robinson’s arguments and by his application of somatic theory to cultural texts that this book plays a key role in moving scholarship beyond the stalemate that now exists in postcolonial theory.” —Molly Blyth, professor of English literature, Canadian studies, and indigenous studies, Trent University

Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture is Douglas Robinson’s study of postcolonial affect—specifically, of the breakdown of the normative (regulatory) circulation of affect in the refugee experience and the colonial encounter, the restructuring of that regulatory circulation in colonization, and the persistence of that restructuring in decolonization and intergenerational trauma. Robinson defines “somatics” as a cultural construction of “reality” and “identity” through the regulatory circulation of evaluative affect.

This book is divided into three essays covering the refugee experience, colonization and decolonization, and intergenerational trauma. Each essay contains a review of empirical studies of its main topic, a study of literary representations of that topic, and a study of postcolonial theoretical spins. The literary representations in the refugee essay are a novel and short story by the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat; in the colonization essay a short film by Javier Fesser and a novella by Mahasweta Devi (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak); and in the intergenerational trauma essay novels by James Welch and Toni Morrison and a short story by Percival Everett. The first essay’s theoretical spins include Deleuze and Guattari on nomad thought and Iain Chambers on migrancy; the second’s, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and theories of postcolonial affect in Bhabha and Spivak; the third’s, work on historical trauma by Cathy Caruth and Dominic LaCapra.

Douglas Robinson is Dean of Arts and Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University.