Remembering Disaster and Ecologies of Affect in Nina Bouraoui’s Le jour du séisme (1999) and Nathacha Appanah’s Le dernier frère (2007)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores ‘ecologies of affect’ in literary representations of disaster—earthquakes, flash floods and cyclones—with reference to Nina Bouraoui’s Le jour du séisme (1999) and Nathacha Appanah’s Le dernier frère (2007). These narratives of so-called ‘natural’ disaster privilege affective modes of remembrance linked to violent regimes. In Le jour du séisme, the El Asnam earthquake of 1980 is an opportunity to explore living on the fault line between French and Algerian histories. In Le dernier frère, a devastating flash flood facilitates the unlikely encounter between Raj, a Mauritian boy, and David, a young Jewish refugee detained by British colonial authorities during the Second World War. Through a comparative analysis, this article shows how representations of natural hazards frame an unsettling confrontation between past and present that influences different approaches to affective, embodied and gendered forms of historical remembrance.