'Some kind of tomorrow': Postcolonial narrative and the work of mourning (South Africa, Guyana, J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison)

This thesis focuses on three postcolonial novelists who incorporate spectral presences into their narratives in order to bear witness to histories of racial oppression. In teaching us how to relate to these spectral presences, each narrative invites us to acknowledge our historical indebtedness and participate in a collective work of mourning.; Chapter One examines three novels by J. M. Coetzee: Foe, Life and Times of Michael K, and Waiting For the Barbarians. Coetzee's position as a white South African produces an insurmountable gap between his privileged narrators and the figures of alterity whose histories the narrators wish to relate. These figures are engaged in silent acts of inconsolable mourning which the narrators are only able to witness from afar. Each narrative implicates the reader in a desire to traverse this gap and looks forward to a day in which a work of collective mourning would truly be possible.; Chapter Two looks at the essays and fiction of the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris. In direct contrast to Coetzee's inconsolable fiction, Harris' novels are an explicitly consolatory revelation of the "complex mutuality" of oppressor and oppressed. In Palace of the Peacock, for instance, the narrator's presence as empathic witness constitutes the difference within the repetition of the colonial voyage and offers the colonising crew the "ghost of a chance" of reconciling themselves with the native folk.; Chapter Three is an extended analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved , in which the memory of racial injustice constitutes a physical impediment to mourning. While Morrison's novels function on one level as the recovery of African-American history and thus as a form of cultural memory, on another level they encounter the materiality of a racial memory that resists verbalisation and mourning and thus the impossibility of reclaiming the "sixty million and more" victims of slavery and the Middle Passage.; For all three writers, the possibility of postcolonial community is contingent not on reclaiming a continuous cultural history but on learning to acknowledge the discontinuous presence of a past that can never be fully reclaimed.