This project concentrates on the reparative potential of literature as a tool for revealing and communicating the complexity of lived experience and sensory knowledge in conflict states, with a focus on “partition states”. Both prototype and laboratory, the policy solution of partition and its retrospective rationale as a “natural” or even desired outworking of democratic will in territories with substantial sectarian divisions amongst their populace was born and bred in Ireland before it was packaged up and sent abroad to the other problem children of Empire. The “official histories” of partition occlude the harms it instantiates and perpetuates and tie a narrative of “resolution” to mere cessation of conflict, an inadequate framework for real redress or reparative work. This project seeks to explore the reparative potential of literature in an epistemic justice framework, drawing on work by Miranda Fricker, and treating knowledge as a bodily and embodied experience, concentrating on modalities of affective shift enabled through encounter with “unsettling” fictions. The intention is to evolve a more workable vocabulary for discussing colonial trauma, with particular attention to partition states and sectarian legacies, and to consider what modes of redress – cultural, communal, and formal – this might make possible.
DR. PATRICIA MALONE
CURRICULUM VITAE
Patricia Malone is a scholar of modern and contemporary literature. She currently works at Queen’s University, Belfast, where she obtained her PhD. She has also held posts at the University of Sheffield and the University of Edinburgh. Her forthcoming monograph, Novel Forms in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh University Press), explores the construction of the contemporary, contexts of the attention economy, and the capacities of text as technology. Other research interests include expanding understandings of harm and its articulation beyond clinical accounts of trauma; processes of affective shift; and the distinctive paradigm of partition as a colonial strategy.
