Falling for Jazz

In Ann-Marie McDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, the tensions of migration and hybridity are configured through the perversity of desire and narratives of trauma. The story is set in a mining town in Cape Breton Island and represents a complexly diverse Canada, replete with scandal, hatred, and slippery racial dynamics. When this affect is unbound, it returns not only to the lost time of past racial traumas but also to the lost time of sexual traumas. Trauma’s repetitions are, however, always a distortion because memory is, as Cathy Caruth puts it, ‘‘a filtering of the original event through the fiction of traumatic repression’’ (15). The original event of trauma can, therefore, only be performed, never repre­sented. Said differently, although the terrors of history, such as slavery, are unspeakable, they are not, as Paul Gilroy suggests, inexpressible (73).1

Art · Art history · Cognitive dissonance · Event (particle physics · Falling (accident · Hatred · Hybridity · Jazz · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Race (biology · Racialization · Racism · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology

• Deviant Women

  Open Access•Tiina Mäntymäki, Marinella Rodi-Risberg et al.•Deviant women•2015

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