Embodied Pasts. Body as Memory in Postcolonial Speculative Fiction
Embodied Pasts. Body as Memory in Postcolonial Speculative Fiction

Summary/Abstract: The article considers the ways in which postcolonial speculative fiction con- ceptualizes the Othered body—particularly the female body—as the corporeal manifestation of collective memory as well as the historical narrative. Therefore, the article proposes that for three authors: Larissa Lai, Suzette Mayr, and Andrea Hairston, the experience of the body constitutes a fundamental element of con- structing (or rather reconstructing) the continuity of the historical narrative in colonial and postcolonial realities. In this formulation, the body of the Other be- comes the place in which the past, the present, and the future converge, allowing the Othered subject to reach the hitherto inaccessible histories and reconstruct the fragmentary memories of diasporic communities, which pave the way for an ultimate revision of the colonial discourse. The body of the Other becomes, then, not only the locus of ancestral memories, but also a tool of resistance against the hegemonic historical narrative.

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