Remnants of Refusal Feminist Affect, National Trauma

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.

About the author

Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf is Associate Professor of Film at Ohio University.

Product details

• Authors: Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Content: Book
• Product form: Hardback
• Publication date: 08.04.2025
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; Fiction > Poetry, drama
• EAN: 9798855802146
• ISBN: 9798855802146
• Pages: 258
• Series: SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory
• Subjects: China, France, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women's Studies, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory, LITERARY CRITICISM / Comparative Literature, LITERARY CRITICISM / Asian / Chinese, Comparative Literature, Feminism & feminist theory, Literature: history & criticism, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, Gender studies: women, Feminism and feminist theory, Gender studies: women and girls, Literature: history and criticism, Film Theory & Criticism, Film history, theory or criticism