Memories of Violence in Peru and the Congo: Writing on the Brink

The book presents an intertextual and comparative analysis of memories of violence in Peruvian and Congolese Literature.

Examining a variety of novels that offer insightful representations of violence in their respective historical settings, the author argues that similar historical experiences between Latin America and Africa engender ethical/aesthetic responses and enhance trans-continental critical dialogues in comparative literary studies. In the same way that the drama of the Congo has become the symbolic open wound of (post)colonial dispensation in Africa, Spanish conquest in Latin America also produced spaces where the legacy of colonialism is strongly visible and memorable, providing fertile ground for the reproduction of violence. This book explores the concept and reality of violence beyond its most obvious manifestations, demonstrating how in the colonial contexts of Peru and the Congo, violence was a function of (post)colonial power dynamics and deeply engrained socio-political, economic and cultural ordering and othering. From this perspective, the work considers and re-examines theoretical contributions from authors such as John Galtung, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Wallerstein, Anibal Quijano, Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Eboussi Boulaga, Pierre Nora, Susan Sontag, Stevan Weine, Cathy Caruth and Nelson Maldonado-Torres.

This book will be of interest for scholars working on how violence is explored and represented in literature and other art forms.

Gilbert Shang Ndi is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Cluster of Excellence - Africa Multiple, at the University of Bayreuth, working on the Project: Black Atlantic Revisited: African and South American UNESCO-World Heritage Sites and ＂Shadowed Spaces＂ of Performative Memory. A member of the Junges Kolleg (Young Colleague) Programme of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Munich), he recently completed a Feodor Lynen Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. He received his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Bayreuth in 2014. Gilbert Shang Ndi is the author of State/Society: Narrating Transformations in Selected African Novels (2017) and has coedited Tracks and Traces of Violence (2017) and Re-Writing Pasts, Imagining Futures: Critical Explorations of Contemporary African Fiction and Theater (2017).