Falling for Jazz: Desire, Dissonance, and Racial Collaboration

• Published in: Canadian Review of American Studies
• Main Author: Georgis, Dina
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2005
• Subjects: Literature and Literary Theory; History; Cultural Studies; Breton Island
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cras-s035-02-06; https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-s035-02-06

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