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.

摘要

本文参考 Nina Bouraoui 的Le jour du séisme（1999 年）和 Nathacha Appanah 的Le dernier frère（2007年），探讨了灾难文学表征中的“情感生态学”——地震、山洪暴发和飓风。这些所谓的“自然”灾害的叙述赋予了与暴力政权相关的情感记忆模式。在Le jour duséisme 中，1980 年的 El Asnam 地震是一个探索生活在法国和阿尔及利亚历史断层线上的机会。在Le dernier frere一场毁灭性的山洪暴发促成了毛里求斯男孩 Raj 和二战期间被英国殖民当局拘留的年轻犹太难民大卫之间不太可能的相遇。通过比较分析，本文展示了自然灾害的表现如何构成过去和现在之间令人不安的对抗，影响对历史记忆的情感、具身和性别形式的不同方法。