Professor Sarah J Lawson Welsh
My current research project is a commissioned monograph, Twenty-first Century Global Literatures: The Caribbean and will be published by Routledge in 2024. My latest book, Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Rowman & Littlefield: 2019) is part of my wider research on postcolonial food cultures, including 'Caribbean Cravings', a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Food and Literature (2018), an article 'On the “Not Translated”: Rethinking Translation and Food in Cross-Cultural Contexts' in Journal of Multicultural Discourse (2017) and guest editorship of a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing (JPW) on 'Culinary Cultures: Food and the Postcolonial', which includes an original article by myself: "If I could Mix Drinks Like my Grandfather, I would be worth marrying...".
I also work on Black British poetry, language politics, issues of canon-formation and Black British women's writing, especially the work of Andrea Levy and Grace Nichols. My latest publications in this area include:
(2022) Special issue of ARIEL (co-edited with Hengahemeh Saroukhani and Michael Perfect) on the Legacy of Andrea Levy.
(2021) "Jay Bernard's Surge: Archival Interventions in Black British Poetry." Journal of Literary and Intermedial Crossings, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. c1-26.
(2020) 'Britain and the Caribbean' in Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell eds, Caribbean Literature in Transition, vol. 3, Cambridge University Press.
(2020)"'This is London! This is Life!' Migrant Time in Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners", in Time, the City and the Literary Imagination, edited by Anne- Marie Evans and Kaley Kramer, Palgrave Macmillan.
(2019) 'Vernacular Voices: Black British Poetry' , in the Cambridge History of Black British and Asian British Writing, edited by Susheila Nasta and Mark Stein, Cambridge University Press.
(2015) 'Black British Poetry' in The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry 1945-2010, edited by Ed Larrissy, Cambridge University Press. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cambridge-Companion-British-Companions-Literature/dp/1107462843
I am a Founding Editor of JPW, the international Journal of Postcolonial Writing (formerly World Literature Written in English), published by Taylor & Francis. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1744-
9855&linktype=5 .
I am associate editor of the Palgrave series "Teaching the New English"
My monograph, the first ever on Guyanese/ black British writer, Grace Nichols, was published by Northcote House in the British Council 'Writers and their Work' series in 2007, now part of Liverpool University Press.
The co-edited collection, Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for a New Millennium was published by Routledge in 2009.
http://www.routledgeliterature.com/books/Rerouting-the-Postcolonial-isbn9780415543255
I also co-edited The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, first published in 1996.
http://www.routledgeliterature.com/books/The-Routledge-Reader-in-Caribbean-Literature-isbn9780415120494
My pedagogic research includes:
(2022) "'Culinary Cultures': Theorising postcolonial food cultures"
in Decolonizing the Literature Curriculum, edited by Charlotte Beyer (Palgrave).
(2014) ‘Encountering the Elephant in the Room: Teaching Race and Gender on a first year module’ invited speaker at HEA event: Towards a postcolonial pedagogy: Engaging with literary representations of ‘race’, racism and ethnicity, Reading University: ‘Encountering the Elephant in the Room: Teaching Race and Gender on a first year module’. This can be accessed online on the HEA website or here on my academia.edu pages.
(2011) ‘Bodies, Texts and Theories: Teaching Gender within Postcolonial Studies’, in Alice Ferrebe & Fiona Tolan (Eds) Teaching Gender (Palgrave Macmillan ‘Teaching the New English Series’) (General Editor Ben Knights), Chapter 11, pp.138-157.
Teaching
I have taught a wide range of courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level at the Universities of Hull, Warwick, Northampton and York St John.
Supervision
I am a UK Council for Graduate Education recognized Research Supervisor.
I have supervised doctoral theses on Caribbean, Sri Lankan, Indian, Black British and British Asian writing and nineteenth to twentieth-first century writers,. currently supervise doctoral theses on Friendship and the History of Emotions in Victorian women's writing, Caribbean women's writing, 'Corporeal histories' in recent African-American male-authored novels, Food and Identity in Theatre Performance and the politics of decolonizing the Curriculum in Secondary Education. I welcome enquiries about doctoral supervision in the areas of postcolonial food studies, Anglophone Caribbean and black British writing.
Supervisors: Prof. David Dabydeen, Centre for Caribbean Studies, and Warwick University.
Phone: 01904 624624
Address: Professor of Global Literatures
School of Humanities,
York St John University
Lord Mayor's Walk
York YO30 7EX
UK
Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy, U.K.
UK National Supervisor Recognition.
I also work on Black British poetry, language politics, issues of canon-formation and Black British women's writing, especially the work of Andrea Levy and Grace Nichols. My latest publications in this area include:
(2022) Special issue of ARIEL (co-edited with Hengahemeh Saroukhani and Michael Perfect) on the Legacy of Andrea Levy.
(2021) "Jay Bernard's Surge: Archival Interventions in Black British Poetry." Journal of Literary and Intermedial Crossings, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. c1-26.
(2020) 'Britain and the Caribbean' in Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell eds, Caribbean Literature in Transition, vol. 3, Cambridge University Press.
(2020)"'This is London! This is Life!' Migrant Time in Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners", in Time, the City and the Literary Imagination, edited by Anne- Marie Evans and Kaley Kramer, Palgrave Macmillan.
(2019) 'Vernacular Voices: Black British Poetry' , in the Cambridge History of Black British and Asian British Writing, edited by Susheila Nasta and Mark Stein, Cambridge University Press.
(2015) 'Black British Poetry' in The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry 1945-2010, edited by Ed Larrissy, Cambridge University Press. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cambridge-Companion-British-Companions-Literature/dp/1107462843
I am a Founding Editor of JPW, the international Journal of Postcolonial Writing (formerly World Literature Written in English), published by Taylor & Francis. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1744-
9855&linktype=5 .
I am associate editor of the Palgrave series "Teaching the New English"
My monograph, the first ever on Guyanese/ black British writer, Grace Nichols, was published by Northcote House in the British Council 'Writers and their Work' series in 2007, now part of Liverpool University Press.
The co-edited collection, Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for a New Millennium was published by Routledge in 2009.
http://www.routledgeliterature.com/books/Rerouting-the-Postcolonial-isbn9780415543255
I also co-edited The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, first published in 1996.
http://www.routledgeliterature.com/books/The-Routledge-Reader-in-Caribbean-Literature-isbn9780415120494
My pedagogic research includes:
(2022) "'Culinary Cultures': Theorising postcolonial food cultures"
in Decolonizing the Literature Curriculum, edited by Charlotte Beyer (Palgrave).
(2014) ‘Encountering the Elephant in the Room: Teaching Race and Gender on a first year module’ invited speaker at HEA event: Towards a postcolonial pedagogy: Engaging with literary representations of ‘race’, racism and ethnicity, Reading University: ‘Encountering the Elephant in the Room: Teaching Race and Gender on a first year module’. This can be accessed online on the HEA website or here on my academia.edu pages.
(2011) ‘Bodies, Texts and Theories: Teaching Gender within Postcolonial Studies’, in Alice Ferrebe & Fiona Tolan (Eds) Teaching Gender (Palgrave Macmillan ‘Teaching the New English Series’) (General Editor Ben Knights), Chapter 11, pp.138-157.
Teaching
I have taught a wide range of courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level at the Universities of Hull, Warwick, Northampton and York St John.
Supervision
I am a UK Council for Graduate Education recognized Research Supervisor.
I have supervised doctoral theses on Caribbean, Sri Lankan, Indian, Black British and British Asian writing and nineteenth to twentieth-first century writers,. currently supervise doctoral theses on Friendship and the History of Emotions in Victorian women's writing, Caribbean women's writing, 'Corporeal histories' in recent African-American male-authored novels, Food and Identity in Theatre Performance and the politics of decolonizing the Curriculum in Secondary Education. I welcome enquiries about doctoral supervision in the areas of postcolonial food studies, Anglophone Caribbean and black British writing.
Supervisors: Prof. David Dabydeen, Centre for Caribbean Studies, and Warwick University.
Phone: 01904 624624
Address: Professor of Global Literatures
School of Humanities,
York St John University
Lord Mayor's Walk
York YO30 7EX
UK
Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy, U.K.
UK National Supervisor Recognition.
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Books by Professor Sarah J Lawson Welsh
Writing by second generation Caribbean migrants is deeply marked by issues of un/belonging to the national project and characterised by a generational shift in terms of articulating cultural affiliations and attachments to both the Caribbean and Britain. Writers engage with blackness as a political signifier and a rallying point for all non-white ethnicities in Britain that can be empowering in terms of claiming a place and identity within the experience and history of Britishness. Caribbean and black British literatures in the UK generally offer a different and revisionary perspective on British history and diasporic communities by bringing attention to the Brixton riots (Alex Wheatle’s Brixton Rock, 1999), the New Cross Massacre (LKJ’s poetry and John LaRose’s The New Cross Massacre Story) or multicultural experience in the city (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, 2000), as well as much deeper and longer histories of a Caribbean presence in the UK which can struggle to be acknowledged. Alongside the urgency of contesting racism, these narratives also articulate intersectional identities informed by class, gender and sexuality as it is experienced within and across the UK & the Caribbean. Like diasporic literature in the US and Canada, contemporary black British literature is very much connected, conceptually and poetically, with Caribbean literature and that of the larger diaspora and therefore merits special critical attention as constitutive of it.
Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter One Famine, Feeding and Feasting: Slave Foods, Provision Grounds and the Planters’ Tables
Chapter Two White Writings: The Nineteenth Century
Chapter Three Black Hunger and White Plenitude: Food and Social Order in Two Historiographic Metafictions
Chapter Four Caribbean Food, Writing and Identity
Chapter Five KitchenTalk: Caribbean Women Talk about Food
Chapter Six Reading the Culinary Nation: Recipes Books and Barbados
Chapter Seven ‘Put Some Music in Your Food’: Caribbean Food and Diaspora
Bibliography
celebrates linguistic playfulness. The borders between linguistic varieties are by no means absolute or static, as the emergence and marked growth of ‘London Jamaican’ (Mark Sebba) indicates. Asian British writer Daljit Nagra takes liberties with English for different reasons. Rather than having recourse to established Creole languages, and blending them with Standard English, his heteroglot poems frequently emulate “Punglish”, the English of migrants whose first language is Punjabi. Whilst it is the language prestige of London Jamaican that has been significantly enhanced since the 1990s, a fact not only confirmed by linguistic research but also by its transethnic uses both in the streets and on the page, Nagra’s substantial success and the mainstream attention he receives also indicate the clout of vernacular voices in poetry. They have the potential to connect with oral traditions and cultural memories, to record linguistic varities, and to endow ‘street cred’ to authors and texts. In this chapter, these double-voiced poetic languages are also read as signs of resistance against residual monologic ideologies of Englishness.
Bringing together a group of leading and emerging intellectuals, and mapping new directions in postcolonial studies, the volume includes sections on:
• New growth areas from cosmopolitan theories and the utopian to diaspora and transnationalism
• New subject matters such as sexuality and queer theory, ecocriticism and postcolonialism in new locations (Eastern Europe, China)
• New theoretical perspectives on globalization (fundamentalism, terror and theories of ‘affect’)
Each section incorporates a clear, concise introduction, making this volume both an accessible overview of current concerns in the field whilst also an invigorating collection of scholarship for the new millennium.
Contributors include: Bill Ashcroft, Anna Ball, Elleke Boehmer, Diana Brydon, Simon Gikandi, Erin Goheen Glanville, James Graham, Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Victor Li, Nadia Louar, Deborah Madsen, Jeffrey Mather, Nirmala Menon, Kaori Nagai, Jane Poyner, Robert Spencer and Patrick Williams.
'Rounding out the scholarly contributions, Sarah Lawson Welsh’s work contributes
to the growing body of research concerning the culture(s) of food and taste in postcolonial and Caribbean studies. In “‘A Table of Plenty’: Representations of Food and Social Order in Caribbean Writing: Some Early Accounts, Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song,” she examines the relationship between writing and cooking in historical documents of slavery as well as neo-slave novels, considering the significance of food hierarchies and the creolisation of food cultures in Caribbean contexts. Building on Richard Wilk’s analysis of food status and respectability in Belize, she argues that both Levy and Phillips employ “narrative strategies which deliberately decentre the hegemony of the white Creole accounts upon which they draw.”4 She argues that Levy’s novel is more radical than Phillips’s in its subversive potential due to its ability to “disrupt the intertextual field”5 and realign our reading of archival sources. Bringing archival texts into dialogue with fictional sources, Lawson Welsh offers innovative readings that shed new light on the interpretation of past-present texts and practices related to food culture. She skillfully decodes subversive practices as well as calls attention to the culture of respectability that led the plantocracy to value imported foodstuffs and recipes over the (more) local and indigenous. This innovative article opens up new perspectives and reading practices in Caribbean studies through its careful analysis of the consumption of
food and narrative.'
Abstract: The Caribbean is in many ways, as Richard Wilk has shown in his 2006 study of food and globalization in a Belizean context, the perfect example of the mixing of ethnicities, cultures and culinary practices as well as a region with one of the longest histories of global connectedness and globalizing processes in relation to food. However, there have been surprisingly very few studies of the relationship between food and culture in a Caribbean context (see Higson 2008 for one valuable exception). This article builds and extends upon Wilk’s important work on food status and respectability in Belize (2006, 2008) by considering the textual representation of food, food patterns and foodways in some earlier – and crucially, in some wider - Caribbean contexts. The main focus is on the relationship between food and social order in a Caribbean plantation context and, in particular, on responses to food and social hierarchies of food status (e.g. between indigenous, naturalized or imported foods), as they are explored and mediated in a number of Caribbean and diasporic Caribbean texts contemporary to, or set in, the colonial plantation period. A related focus is the shift from food practices which perform a version of the culinary nation, constructing national identity, whether Caribbean or expatriate European, and the establishment of a more creolized identity through food. The paper acknowledges that foodways and food practices have been richly represented in and through Caribbean writing since the earliest colonial period (earlier if we include oral tradition and food practices) and across a number of different genres: plantation accounts, memoirs, fiction, poetry, essays, recipes [oral and written] and cookery writing. As such, the paper considers attitudes to food cultures and social order in a range of written sources: early traveller and planter’s accounts and two more recent literary texts: Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge (1991) and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010). It is argued that the latter, as historiographic metafictions, not only draw upon some of the early sources in some interesting ways, but stage and re-present, in a more self-consciously ambivalent way, early attitudes to food and social order in a Caribbean context.
Bringing together a group of leading and emerging intellectuals, this volume charts and challenges the diversity of postcolonial studies, including sections on:
•new directions and growth areas from performance and autobiography to diaspora and transnationalism
•new subject matters such as sexuality and queer theory, ecocriticism and discussions of areas of Europe as postcolonial spaces
•new theoretical directions such as globalization, fundamentalism, terror and theories of ‘affect’.
Each section incorporates a clear, concise introduction, making this volume both an accessible overview of the field whilst also an invigorating collection of scholarship for the new millennium.
"
Writers from 1900 to the present, both famous and less well-known, are given a voice in this remarkable anthology which encompasses poetry, short stories, essays, articles and interviews. Amongst the many represented here are:
* C.L.R. James
* George Lamming
* Jean Rhys
* Benjamin Zephaniah
* Claude McKay
* Louise Bennett
* Jamaica Kincaid
* Sylvia Wynter
* Derek Walcott
* David Dabydeen
* Grace Nichols
The Reader provides an accessible historical and cultural introduction to the writings, making this volume an ideal teaching tool as well as a fascinating collection for anyone interested in the literature of the Caribbean. "
Writing by second generation Caribbean migrants is deeply marked by issues of un/belonging to the national project and characterised by a generational shift in terms of articulating cultural affiliations and attachments to both the Caribbean and Britain. Writers engage with blackness as a political signifier and a rallying point for all non-white ethnicities in Britain that can be empowering in terms of claiming a place and identity within the experience and history of Britishness. Caribbean and black British literatures in the UK generally offer a different and revisionary perspective on British history and diasporic communities by bringing attention to the Brixton riots (Alex Wheatle’s Brixton Rock, 1999), the New Cross Massacre (LKJ’s poetry and John LaRose’s The New Cross Massacre Story) or multicultural experience in the city (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, 2000), as well as much deeper and longer histories of a Caribbean presence in the UK which can struggle to be acknowledged. Alongside the urgency of contesting racism, these narratives also articulate intersectional identities informed by class, gender and sexuality as it is experienced within and across the UK & the Caribbean. Like diasporic literature in the US and Canada, contemporary black British literature is very much connected, conceptually and poetically, with Caribbean literature and that of the larger diaspora and therefore merits special critical attention as constitutive of it.
Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter One Famine, Feeding and Feasting: Slave Foods, Provision Grounds and the Planters’ Tables
Chapter Two White Writings: The Nineteenth Century
Chapter Three Black Hunger and White Plenitude: Food and Social Order in Two Historiographic Metafictions
Chapter Four Caribbean Food, Writing and Identity
Chapter Five KitchenTalk: Caribbean Women Talk about Food
Chapter Six Reading the Culinary Nation: Recipes Books and Barbados
Chapter Seven ‘Put Some Music in Your Food’: Caribbean Food and Diaspora
Bibliography
celebrates linguistic playfulness. The borders between linguistic varieties are by no means absolute or static, as the emergence and marked growth of ‘London Jamaican’ (Mark Sebba) indicates. Asian British writer Daljit Nagra takes liberties with English for different reasons. Rather than having recourse to established Creole languages, and blending them with Standard English, his heteroglot poems frequently emulate “Punglish”, the English of migrants whose first language is Punjabi. Whilst it is the language prestige of London Jamaican that has been significantly enhanced since the 1990s, a fact not only confirmed by linguistic research but also by its transethnic uses both in the streets and on the page, Nagra’s substantial success and the mainstream attention he receives also indicate the clout of vernacular voices in poetry. They have the potential to connect with oral traditions and cultural memories, to record linguistic varities, and to endow ‘street cred’ to authors and texts. In this chapter, these double-voiced poetic languages are also read as signs of resistance against residual monologic ideologies of Englishness.
Bringing together a group of leading and emerging intellectuals, and mapping new directions in postcolonial studies, the volume includes sections on:
• New growth areas from cosmopolitan theories and the utopian to diaspora and transnationalism
• New subject matters such as sexuality and queer theory, ecocriticism and postcolonialism in new locations (Eastern Europe, China)
• New theoretical perspectives on globalization (fundamentalism, terror and theories of ‘affect’)
Each section incorporates a clear, concise introduction, making this volume both an accessible overview of current concerns in the field whilst also an invigorating collection of scholarship for the new millennium.
Contributors include: Bill Ashcroft, Anna Ball, Elleke Boehmer, Diana Brydon, Simon Gikandi, Erin Goheen Glanville, James Graham, Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Victor Li, Nadia Louar, Deborah Madsen, Jeffrey Mather, Nirmala Menon, Kaori Nagai, Jane Poyner, Robert Spencer and Patrick Williams.
'Rounding out the scholarly contributions, Sarah Lawson Welsh’s work contributes
to the growing body of research concerning the culture(s) of food and taste in postcolonial and Caribbean studies. In “‘A Table of Plenty’: Representations of Food and Social Order in Caribbean Writing: Some Early Accounts, Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song,” she examines the relationship between writing and cooking in historical documents of slavery as well as neo-slave novels, considering the significance of food hierarchies and the creolisation of food cultures in Caribbean contexts. Building on Richard Wilk’s analysis of food status and respectability in Belize, she argues that both Levy and Phillips employ “narrative strategies which deliberately decentre the hegemony of the white Creole accounts upon which they draw.”4 She argues that Levy’s novel is more radical than Phillips’s in its subversive potential due to its ability to “disrupt the intertextual field”5 and realign our reading of archival sources. Bringing archival texts into dialogue with fictional sources, Lawson Welsh offers innovative readings that shed new light on the interpretation of past-present texts and practices related to food culture. She skillfully decodes subversive practices as well as calls attention to the culture of respectability that led the plantocracy to value imported foodstuffs and recipes over the (more) local and indigenous. This innovative article opens up new perspectives and reading practices in Caribbean studies through its careful analysis of the consumption of
food and narrative.'
Abstract: The Caribbean is in many ways, as Richard Wilk has shown in his 2006 study of food and globalization in a Belizean context, the perfect example of the mixing of ethnicities, cultures and culinary practices as well as a region with one of the longest histories of global connectedness and globalizing processes in relation to food. However, there have been surprisingly very few studies of the relationship between food and culture in a Caribbean context (see Higson 2008 for one valuable exception). This article builds and extends upon Wilk’s important work on food status and respectability in Belize (2006, 2008) by considering the textual representation of food, food patterns and foodways in some earlier – and crucially, in some wider - Caribbean contexts. The main focus is on the relationship between food and social order in a Caribbean plantation context and, in particular, on responses to food and social hierarchies of food status (e.g. between indigenous, naturalized or imported foods), as they are explored and mediated in a number of Caribbean and diasporic Caribbean texts contemporary to, or set in, the colonial plantation period. A related focus is the shift from food practices which perform a version of the culinary nation, constructing national identity, whether Caribbean or expatriate European, and the establishment of a more creolized identity through food. The paper acknowledges that foodways and food practices have been richly represented in and through Caribbean writing since the earliest colonial period (earlier if we include oral tradition and food practices) and across a number of different genres: plantation accounts, memoirs, fiction, poetry, essays, recipes [oral and written] and cookery writing. As such, the paper considers attitudes to food cultures and social order in a range of written sources: early traveller and planter’s accounts and two more recent literary texts: Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge (1991) and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010). It is argued that the latter, as historiographic metafictions, not only draw upon some of the early sources in some interesting ways, but stage and re-present, in a more self-consciously ambivalent way, early attitudes to food and social order in a Caribbean context.
Bringing together a group of leading and emerging intellectuals, this volume charts and challenges the diversity of postcolonial studies, including sections on:
•new directions and growth areas from performance and autobiography to diaspora and transnationalism
•new subject matters such as sexuality and queer theory, ecocriticism and discussions of areas of Europe as postcolonial spaces
•new theoretical directions such as globalization, fundamentalism, terror and theories of ‘affect’.
Each section incorporates a clear, concise introduction, making this volume both an accessible overview of the field whilst also an invigorating collection of scholarship for the new millennium.
"
Writers from 1900 to the present, both famous and less well-known, are given a voice in this remarkable anthology which encompasses poetry, short stories, essays, articles and interviews. Amongst the many represented here are:
* C.L.R. James
* George Lamming
* Jean Rhys
* Benjamin Zephaniah
* Claude McKay
* Louise Bennett
* Jamaica Kincaid
* Sylvia Wynter
* Derek Walcott
* David Dabydeen
* Grace Nichols
The Reader provides an accessible historical and cultural introduction to the writings, making this volume an ideal teaching tool as well as a fascinating collection for anyone interested in the literature of the Caribbean. "
Many of the poems in Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019) were inspired by Bernard’s 2017 residency at the George Padmore Institute, London, an experience that allowed them to access the Institute’s unique archives on black British history. This article considers both the politics and aesthetics of Surge as a collection which addresses the social and material in/exclusions experienced by black Britons within some specific historical and socio-cultural contexts, including the 1981 New Cross and 2017 Grenfell fires in London. Drawing on theoretical insights such as Derrida’s concepts of ‘hauntology’ and ‘archive fever’, this article argues that the notion of the archive is central to both the aesthetic and political project of Surge. The varied formal and aesthetic experimentation of many of the poems allow Bernard to ask some challenging questions of British society and its relation to its history, as well as the complex tension between public histories and personal accounts. Bernard harnesses the power of poetry to queer or unsettle other kinds of discourse (including orthodox historical narrative) by imaginatively re-embodying hitherto disembodied voices, enabling them to speak in the interstices between private memory and public history in some unique (and strikingly affecting) ways.