When Narration Is Made Flesh

An Affective Reading of Geetanjali Shree’s The Empty Space

Abstract

This paper examines Geetanjali Shree’s That Empty Space (2011) as an exemplary novel exploring the performative power of language in order to re-create an episode of violence somewhere in the Indian sub-continent. Describing the explosion of a bomb in a university cafe, the narration makes events emerge as the product of a field of forces relying on the bodily perception and sensorial participation of the reader. The essay focuses on the ways through which Shree’s novel shuns hermeneutic or representational readings of violence in favour of a skin or ‘haptic’ writing whose performative power relocates a story of violence from its geographical location to the body of the reader. In acknowledging the human body as the shared ground of any possible communication, the author attempts to overcome the divisive binarisms and cultural juxtapositions brought about by the ocularcentric understandings of knowledge and culture.