"Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma interrogates the relationship between the literary representation of postcolonial trauma and the embodied experience of reading. As the conditions from which postcolonial literatures have emerged necessitate a break from the "proper" ways to represent trauma, postcolonial writers expand and complicate the very practice of reading. Though postcolonial literature's capacity to represent trauma has received considerable scrutiny in recent years, Postcolonial Parabola is innovative in its consideration of the postcolonial text as a literary object. Working within a phenomenological framework that ties together disparate postcolonial periods, Jay Rajiva explores how narrative structure shapes the experience of reading the postcolonial literatures of South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. He argues that these texts enmesh the reader in an asymptotic tactility: though the reader might approach the disclosure of trauma, he cannot arrive at it. Awareness of the asymptotic nature of reading such works is crucial to a meaningful, ethical engagement with literary representations of postcolonial trauma."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

"An innovative study of literary representations of postcolonial trauma, exploring how they both expand and limit the reader's experience of trauma"--Bloomsbury Publishing.