I am grateful for the responses to my essay on “repeat viewing” by Kabir, Mazumdar, and Wong, each of whom offers a sympathetic critical response, pointing to ways of elaborating and complicating my argument about the relationship of repetition to difference in Bollywood films. In this comment I stress issues of genre, history, and context.

By generating friction with the concept of expansion, Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 intervenes in debates shaping comparative literature studies today. Analyzing the work that friction performs in this book sends us beyond the provocative and nuanced readings contained within its pages and sets it in conversation with critical and literary writings it does not address. Miming the ethos and using the practices of Chimeras of Form by expanding its trajectory, I show what frictions and itineraries of inquiry might emerge from its theorization of literature in a global age.

Taking into account the interconnectedness of spaces, a number of theorists and writers have investigated the impact of trauma on subjectivities within their social, cultural, and political environments. In postcolonial studies, scholars such as Veena Das (2007)2, Antjie Krog and colleagues (2009)3, and Stef Craps (2012)4 have convincingly argued that postcolonial trauma survivors are not necessarily under the tyranny of the past; to the contrary, they may take advantage of the past event by immersing themselves in the trauma. Jay Rajiva gives the example of those survivors who cannot distance themselves from the past because they are compelled “to perform the grief of the community in both clothing and gesture. Such a submersion in past trauma becomes a way for a trauma survivor to expand and even renegotiate her relationship to that same community… . Essentially, the survivor inhabits the enforced retriggering of her trauma but finds the means—in daily life, over months and years—to make sense of her trauma.”5

Happiness explores the themes of violence and trauma as one of its fundamental concerns. In this regard, the character and role of Dr. Attila Asare, a Ghanaian psychiatrist, is crucial to understanding Forna’s theorizations on trauma and advancement of a new hypothesis on its manifestations and possibilities of recovery. In laying the foundation for the articulation of his new theory of trauma, Attila gives us a window into violence in two different geographical settings: Bosnia in the winter of 1995 and Sierra Leone in 1995. It is significant that both wars occurred at about the same time and that they were both notorious for the nature and extent of the carnage that characterize them.

Aminatta Forna’s latest novel, Happiness, has deservedly won commendations from eminent critics and reviewers such as Salman Rushdie. Some readers, however, while being sensitive to its charm, to the elegance of the writing, to the power of the description and the remarkable use of detail, might find the relationship between the title and the numerous concerns of the novel rather problematic. Although titles do not always suggest the main concerns of the novel, they can act as significant pointers. This novel lays hands on apparently disparate elements such as the need to protect animals and other endangered species, the search for a disturbed young boy whose mother has been wrongfully detained by British immigration authorities, the need to care for a once brilliant scientist now suffering from Alzheimer’s, the psychiatric issues involved in the defense of a young widow accused of arson, and the brutalities perpetrated by humans all over the world. Some readers might wonder whether there is a central focus and whether that focus is indeed happiness. Essentially, the main issue is how the concept of happiness fits into all of this. And yet, it is the argument of this paper that Happiness possesses an overarching common thread and manifests an overwhelming central concern.

The fourth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s classic work Black Skin, White Masks, titled “The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized,” is a powerful critique of Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1956). Born in France of Corsican parents, Dominique-Octave Mannoni had come to know the African colonial condition primarily through his ethnological work in Madagascar, where he spent twenty years. The argument of Prospero and Caliban is that colonial “situations” are the product of “misunderstanding, of mutual incomprehension.”1 The situation, Mannoni observes in the introduction, is created the very moment a white man appears in the midst of a tribe, and he goes on to elaborate on its distinctive and varied features: dominance of a majority by a minority, economic exploitation, the seemingly benign paternalism of the civilizing mission, and racism. The colonizer’s “grave lack of sociability combined with a pathological urge to dominate” gives him a “Prospero complex”2 while the colonized Malagasy, forced out of their own history, genealogy, and tradition and victimized by a failed European interpellation, develop a corresponding “dependence complex.”3 Neither inferiority nor superiority, “dependence,” Mannoni claims, is Caliban’s reliance on colonizers fostered by a sense of abandonment.

Aarthi Vadde is an associate professor of English at Duke University. She is author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914–2016, which was the winner of the 2018 Harry Levin Prize awarded by the ACLA. She is at work on a second monograph tentatively titled The Amateur Spirit: Contemporary Literature in the Sharing Economy and is co-editing a collection entitled The Critic as Amateur.

This essay argues that the phenomenon of repeat viewing of films by Bollywood audiences is worthy of being treated as an unusual cultural practice in which repetition and difference support and reinforce each other in the manner suggested by Gilles Deleuze. This relationship is particularly enabled by the relationship of music to plot in these films, in which song sequences provide a repetitive or percussive element that deepens the melodic and innovative element provided by the story. Not all films are able to attract repeat viewers, which raises a question about the role of the “formula” in the Hindi film industry. Further, the pleasures of repetition in this domain offer a suggestive perspective on India’s larger political dilemma, which is to combine the repetition of Western modernity with the unique developmental signature of Indian culture.

The publication of Happiness in 2019 marked a near twenty-year immersion in narratives that dealt with notions of war and trauma, an inquiry that began with a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002), written at the time of the civil conflict in Sierra Leone, and continuing through four novels, culminating in Happiness. In The Memory of Love and through the character of British psychologist Adrian Lockheart, a trauma specialist who arrives in Sierra Leone in the wake of the conflict, I engaged most directly with conceptual notions of trauma. It is in this novel that Attila Asare, a Ghanaian psychiatrist who runs a mental health facility in postwar Sierra Leone, makes his first appearance. Some years later, following publication of the Croatian-set novel The Hired Man, I found myself compelled to return to the character of Asare and the subject of trauma in my most recent novel, Happiness.

This essay provides a critical review of the field of postcolonial African genocide writing. The review makes a case for scholarly recognition of the discourse of African genocide literature. The essay advances some broad claims, among which include the following: that genocidal atrocities in Africa have provoked a body of imaginative literature, which, among other things, has attempted to imagine the conditions giving rise to African genocides, and that this body of literature underlines a confluence of sensibilities shaping atrocity writings and their critical receptions in Africa since the mid-twentieth century. The review provides a critical overview of fictional narratives as well as their scholarly receptions bordering on genocidal atrocities in the Nigerian and Rwandan contexts.