Two short lunchtime papers:
Ben Vince, ‘Narrative Retreat in Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories’
Abstract: Where does narrative go when its marginal subjects need a reprieve from its encompassment? Or when the more-than-human agents which constitute it do not fit within the social parameters of its (non)human story? This is the question I reach towards with this paper, which considers the possibility of narrative retreat in Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), a novel which concerns 200 years in Black queer vampire Gilda’s (un-)life. Considering the episodic nature of this (collection of) story(/ies) alongside the marginalitites of vampirism, Blackness, and queerness, I sketch out a means through which we might be able to feel (even if we cannot read) the interstices between chapters, during which Gilda travels from narrativised locale to narrativised locale. I identify these drifting spaces as those in which Gilda lives most intimately in, amongst, and with more-than-humanity, which begs the question of, if we are to read The Gilda Stories with a queer ecological lens (as I do), what are we to make of the fact that these subjects are most distinctly felt when (the) narrative moves away from us?
Bio: Ben Vince is a third year PhD student researching spaces and writings of retreat in queer literature of the last 100 years, and how these texts and their generative solitudes can assist an increasingly disconnected world of ‘ecological loneliness.’ He is funded by the SWW DTP, and is also a published poet who performs in and around Bristol.
Emma Parker, ‘Apartheid Exiles: South African Women in Britain’
Abstract: Edward Said famously describes exile as ‘the unhealable rift … between the self and its true home’, a predicament ‘compelling to think about but terrible to experience’ (173, 2000). This paper focusses on South African women’s experiences of exile in Britain during the apartheid era. It offers a comparative case study of two life writers – Hilda Bernstein and Lauretta Ngcobo – who each edited major autobiographical anthologies of South African life abroad. Bernstein’s The Rift (1994) and Ngcobo’s Prodigal Daughters (2012), suggest that South Africans ‘ceased to belong to coherent’ communities in exile; an exclusive focus on the freedom struggle at home meant South African women abroad could never ‘to belong to the new world in which they found themselves’ (Bernstein xiv). This paper examines both Bernstein’s and Ngcobo’s practice of assembling and producing autobiographical writing, reading their anthologies of exile as distinct examples of collective feminist craft that reveal an alternative archive of both the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the South African diaspora. Through these texts I begin to excavate an overlooked history of women-led literary networks and co-production in the UK, one which reveals the lives and labour of exiled South African writers in the latter decades of the twentieth century.
Bio: Dr Emma Parker is Lecturer in Literature and Gender at the University of Bristol