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Unsworth compresses the conventions that separate narratives of the slave trade from narratives of World War II and from those of historical English entitlement. The climax of the novel joins all three narrative threads at a reenactment of the Battle of Brunanburh (an Anglo-Saxon battle allegedly representing the first truly “English” victory), during which heritage appears as a syncopated word and moral responsibility for “others” is deliberately shunned.
Although many “others” have been singled out as members of “the oppressed” or the poor—what Hardt and Negri call “the multitude”—children have often been denied membership (2004, n.p.). While recalling the “discovery” of childhood in the long nineteenth century and the ensuing conflicts between children’s rights and so-called owners’ rights over children, Anca Vlasopolos focuses on the continuing strands of this conflict from entrenched nineteenth-century plots to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary rewritings. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Joss and Gold (2001) and Peter Rushforth’s Pinkerton’s Sister (2005) rework Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and Rushforth’s Kindergarten (1980) revisits the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” (which portrays children as chattel or disposable goods) against the backdrop of two twentieth-century traumas, the Holocaust and terrorism.
Building on the fracturing of identity caused by such traumas, Andrea Yates compares Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin (1996) and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1939). Both works stage the “self” as inexorably defined by the imperialist“other” and engage with an envisioned interlocutor—while representing empire through the relationship between the “proper name” and the “narrator,” between the witness and the signature. In imaginary dialogues that bear the traits of performativity, both Derrida and Woolf take up issues of national identity and citizenship.
Experimental Nations Globalized
In the second part of this study, contributors move from the initial inquiry of the admittedly binary colonizer/colonized relationship to a