Remnants of Refusal

Analyzes how French and Chinese literary and filmic texts enact a series of feminist affective responses to the erasure of historical trauma.

Remnants of Refusal traces an affective discourse of feminist refusal across a series of French and Chinese works of film and literature. Developing an inventive comparative approach, Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf argues that this discourse takes shape in response to two national traumas and their aftermath: the German Occupation and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, respectively. In both contexts, events associated with the trauma were effectively erased from the official historical record and replaced by an unwritten code of public secrecy. And, in both contexts, three affects-melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion-provide means of expressing mourning without breaking the taboo of direct representation. In films and literary texts by Wang Anyi, Chen Ran, Jia Zhangke, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard, and others, mourning is most frequently borne by and through the bodies of women, generating a broader feminist counternarrative to historical forgetting and burgeoning neoliberalism.