Enriching Collaboration by Mending Wounds: A Wits-Uppsala Partnership in Literary Studies

Is it a sign of naive confidence, audacity or hubris in the spirit of ancient Greek tragedy to focus a congenial and productive partnership on the notion of wounding, which frequently has the consequence of leaving permanent scars? The participants in the Wits-Uppsala collaboration on Imagining America from Southern African and Scandinavian perspectives have been willing to take this risk. After three years of regular exchanges (several of which were funded by SANORD), the time seemed ripe to produce a joint publication. In many respects, this endeavour at once marks the conclusion of the first phase of sharing research material or strategies for postgraduate teaching and the initiation of a new period, which is carefully directed towards the construction of certain kinds of knowledge.

In the last quarter of 2010, the editors of the Journal of Literary Studies approved a special number on Mending Wounds: Healing, Working through, or Staying in Trauma, which is to appear in June 2013. This issue is currently being compiled and edited by David Watson from the University of Uppsala and Liz Kella from both Sdertrn University and the University of Uppsala, as well as Merle Williams and John Masterson from the University of the Witwatersrand. The purpose of the volume is to draw on cognate fields in the Humanities to explore the apparently contradictory perceptions that trauma is unrepresentable, yet most susceptible of representation through literature and/or various other aesthetic modes. The guest editors hope to contribute towards reconfiguring established theories by considering not only freshly imagined methods for resolving trauma, but also the effects of political or ethical investments in keeping trauma alive They have chosen to focus on the corporeal aspects of this phenomenon in its stark inscription on the human body, together with a range of complex psycho-somatic analogues. Since the inaugural theme of this intellectual partnership was Imagining America, while one of the affiliated institutions is located in Johannesburg, the journal number is to focus specifically on North American or Caribbean art and culture, balanced by Southern African experience. In fact, the African emphasis came to seem particularly apt, since the recent history of suffering, personal alienation and social upheaval had threaded its way

through so many conversations between scholars from Wits and their receptive Swedish colleagues.

A call for abstracts, which was disseminated through the Journal of Literary Studies and several electronic research networks, has led to the rigorous and critically engaged selection of seven or eight essays for the volume on Mending Wounds. Three of the contributors are based at Wits and one at the University of Cape Town. From the European side, two authors are associated with the University of Uppsala, while a potential contributor works at Sdertrn University. A submission from the Centre for Trauma Studies in Literature at the University of Ghent was also welcomed, not least because both Wits and Uppsala have enjoyed active connections with this unit. The guest editors are now involved in close discussion with their authors, as they prepare a full manuscript for delivery to the press by the end of August.

A brief preview of the envisaged scope of the special issue highlights the coherence-in-diversity of its constituent papers. From the North American continent, it includes a commentary on William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! a classic novel of the South, disfigured by the Civil War an examination of the post 9/11fictional texts of Don DeLillo, John Updike and Jonathan Safran Foer, and probably a close appraisal of the scars engraved in a couple of novels emerging from minority African- and native-American communities. These points of view are supplemented by an interpretation of Cristina Garcas Dreaming in Cuban, which juxtaposes the endurance of suffering in Cuba and the United States, refracting the pain inflicted in each setting through the values of the other. The Vietnam Project from J. M. Coetzees early work, Dusklands, serves as a kind of link or hinge between typically North American and Southern African concerns; the latter take the specific form of prison memoirs and the fragmented narratives of Marlene van Niekerk, which are so vividly associated with the maimed, fragmented bodies that they depict. Within this broad framework, then, the physical and the psychological become finely imbricated. Faulkners bullets in the dining room table concretize a scarred and distorting collective memory of defeat, just as physical and psychological injuries continue to distress their bearers despite geographical displacement; moreover, the viewing of violent film footage threatens to induce correspondingly brutal, enacted assaults.

In its series of inter-related philosophical orientations, the volume on Mending Wounds is equally dedicated to fulfilling the brief of conceptual innovation. In the reading of Absalom, Absalom!, for example, the conventional categories of trauma studies are replaced by Maurice Merleau-Pontys notion of the chiasm, or the ineluctable intertwining of embodied consciousness and the experienced world as a flesh which becomes redolent with thought, so that lived ideas are deemed to resonate invisibly within the interior horizons of things. Coetzees Dusklands serves to open an investigation into the domain of vicarious trauma and what Susan Sontag terms the war-porn encouraged by repeatedly watching movie footage of savage conflicts. The post-9/11 novels raise compelling questions about personal and national practices of mourning, the need to mend private losses so as to approach healing in the public sphere and the very issue of grievability. Is it, in effect, impermissible to grieve for certain lives? And what of prison narratives? Do the confessions of autobiography mimic the processes of interrogation, and how can a new self, formed by writing, slough off the criminalizing self-contamination inflicted by state security systems?

The preceding outline touches on a few facets of the thought-provoking research which is to be collected in Mending Wounds. Yet this account would prove remiss if it passed over dimensions of such a collaborative venture that are simultaneously inherent in the scholarly process, while exceeding it. Developing this special journal issue has tested, tempered and matured the personal affiliations within the editorial group. At this point, then, it seems more appropriate to write in the first person plural. We have needed to address the difficulties which arose when some potential contributors to the collection were with good reason unable to translate their abstracts into fully fledged articles. We have also found ourselves involved in negotiations about length requirements and deadlines with the administrator of the journal. We have tried to devise suitably searching practices for reviewing the accepted articles, especially those written by the co-editors. We have reflected on the structure of the volume, appropriate criteria for coherence and the standard that we should aim to achieve. Issues of leadership, as well as professional respect and mutual trust, have implicitly traced their way through our deliberations. In all these ways, the Wits-Uppsala collaboration has been scrutinized, consolidated and enriched, thus underscoring the practical importance of embarking on a shared publication project. We have endorsed our initial understanding of an equal partnership, rooted in a commitment to learning from one

another and pursuing globally recognized research objectives. And we have come to appreciate the vital benefit of the working relationships that we have already created, and which we must continue to adapt and recreate if this collaboration is to remain vital and sustainable.

Professor Merle Williams, with Dr John Masterson English, School of Literature and Language Studies, University of the Witwatersrand