Comparative Literature and Literary Theory

In her book-length works i is a long memoried woman and “Picasso, I Want My Face Back,” the Guyanese-British poet Grace Nichols uses poetry to give a voice to a particular woman in history. The lyrical subjects speaking in these works, an unnamed enslaved woman and the artist Dora Maar, respectively, bear witness to the past injustices they have endured. Through close reading, I show that both testimonial accounts address not only the historical violence suffered by these women but also the epistemic violence perpetrated by a modernist representation of them in writing and in painting. This epistemic violence presents them as non-agents, in crisis and as victims. I explore what it means that at the heart of Nichols’ two testimonial projects lies an ethics of agency which not only seeks to make these particular women’s voices heard, but which also presents a mode of writing that favors a particular narrative identity.

The question of how to decolonise the museum has in recent years become prominent for many countries dealing with a colonial past. However, the problem of representation remains a pressing issue within this debate. The question of who is allowed and able to speak for whom scratches the wounds of many museums. This urgent question addresses the need for a decolonisation that reaches further than a diversity program and the representation of artists of colour. One that asks for the revision of past narratives and the imagining of alternative futures for cultural production at large (ter Borg "Nederlandse Kunstmusea").

This paper takes a conceptual journey through the Emily Dickinson Archive Radical Scatters. The archive, initiated by Marta Werner, demonstrates the value and meaning of the textual “fragment,” written by Emily Dickinson on a variety of such materials as envelopes and wrappings. This paper intends to elaborate on the epistemic justice this archive aims to achieve for these particular documents and the textual fragments they carry. The paper does this by taking three steps, from the macro-level of the archive to the micro-level of a single fragment. The interest of this movement is to explore at all levels what a fragment in this context means and does, and how it can inform us about cultural production processes. The three steps will unfold as follows: First, I will discuss the historical and conceptual dimensions of the archive. Second, I will explore the definition of Emily Dickinson’s fragment given by the archive, by describing the unique way the archive gives agency to the fragment. For the third step, I will zoom into a constellation of fragments and will take “a Woe of Ecstasy” (A112) as an exemplary piece to demonstrate how close-reading the fragments can inform us about the value of fragmentation in Emily Dickinson’s poetry for doing revisionist work.

In this research, I question the clinical taken for granted relation between narrative coherence and agency. I do this by offering a redefinition of agency as it is understood within the psychiatric context, and drawing from scholars who define the capacity to agency as an interpersonal endeavour. With a reference to Amelia Rosselli's poetry, I explore language materialities that challenge the above mentioned relation. By bringing together the medical and the literary, I show how a cultural understanding of coherence and agency may define poetic legitimacy and hegemony.