Abstract
After connecting history to urban spatiality in Teju Cole's Open City, this paper develops Rob Nixon's articulation of "slow violence" to demonstrate how John Edgar Wideman and Sherman Alexie's novels depict issues of authenticity in storytelling, highlighting the limitations of representing the effects of “slow violence” on the cultural, physical, and economic welfare of marginalised communities in the aftermath of major violent events.
Highlights
After connecting history to urban spatiality in Teju Cole's Open City, this paper develops Rob Nixon's articulation of "slow violence" to demonstrate how John Edgar Wideman and Sherman Alexie's novels depict issues of authenticity in storytelling, highlighting the limitations of representing the effects of “slow violence” on the cultural, physical, and economic welfare of marginalised communities in the aftermath of major violent events
Nixon articulates these effects as “slow violence”, occurring “. . . gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2)
In Open City, Julius’s first-person narration makes New York’s erased history visible through a reportage style that is more concerned with the textual quality of his own subjectivity than the way these invisible histories are depicted by the media
Summary
After connecting history to urban spatiality in Teju Cole's Open City, this paper develops Rob Nixon's articulation of "slow violence" to demonstrate how John Edgar Wideman and Sherman Alexie's novels depict issues of authenticity in storytelling, highlighting the limitations of representing the effects of “slow violence” on the cultural, physical, and economic welfare of marginalised communities in the aftermath of major violent events. This article will examine two contemporary American novels that, like Open City, are concerned with textual and spatial representations of historical violence.
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