Bare Mind: Dementia and the Diasporic State of Exception in David Chariandy's Soucouyant: A Novel of Forgetting
Date
2013-04-24
Authors
Ludolph, Rebekah
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Abstract
My reading of the figure of Adele, a woman with dementia, in David Chariandy’s novel Soucouyant: A Novel of Forgetting (2007), brings Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical concept of “bare life” together with the notion of the subject in diaspora to theorize a new mentality that I call “bare mind.” The notion of “bare mind” addresses how cognitive imperialism creates a biopolitical state of exception both under forms of sovereign power and within a liberal regime of multicultural governmentality, while acknowledging the ways in which dementia, portrayed as the ‘forgetting’ of dominant knowledge regimes, reveals resistance to cognitive imperialism.
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Keywords
Diaspora, Canadian Multiculturalism, Biopower, Bare Life, Governmentality, Agamben, Dementia, Trinidad, Soucouyant, David Chariandy, Cognitive Imperialism, Diagnosis, Black Atlantic