Diego Garcia: A Novel (London: Fitzcarraldo edns, 2022). Currently available in 5 parts
- Submitting institution
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Birkbeck College
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 2004
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- development of a novel
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
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- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- Part 6 was originally scheduled for publication in March 2020, then delayed to Oct 2020 and has now to moved to April 2021 due to COVID and therefore no longer part of the submission
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Diego Garcia is an experimental novel. This output consists of 5 of 6 instalments, which will come together as volume one of a two-volume work (6 is Covid delayed). It tells the story of Luke Williams and Natasha Soobramanien writing a novel about Diego Garcia. The second volume will be that novel.
Williams and Soobramanien wrote jointly, sharing sentences, sections and editing. Chapters were published in literary magazines (item 2); performed (items 3-4); and will eventually be radically re-worked as a book for Fitzcarraldo/Semiotext(e) (2022). Multiform publication foregrounds process: each iteration feeds the next, shaped by editors, readers and listeners.
The book is written in the first-person plural and third-person singular forms, formally encapsulating the co-authors’ collaboration and friendship. Yet there is no unified, synthesized voice. In performance a musician helped arrange the voices into an intelligible, polyphonic piece. Later chapters embedded insights gathered by performing earlier ones (e.g. columns in Chapters 3-5, item 2.3-5).
Influences include 1960s-70s conceptual art, which brought text into galleries and participatory art (e.g. Yoko Ono, John Cage), which decentres creators and authorises audiences. Ideas on selfhood came from French structuralism and post-structuralism (e.g. Barthes) and black studies (e.g. Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Fred Moton) on relational forms, racial identity and colonial legacies.
Diego Garcia is characterised by absence: its inhabitants have been displaced to make room for a military base; as an atoll, it literally features a hole. Its representational ethics was researched through discussion between the authors (Soobramanian is British Mauritian), Chagossian people and scholars at a Mauritian literary festival (2014). This work comments on the problem of representing an absence, by circling it, mapping it in negotiations between collaborators. The dispersed, open nature of the work refuses unity and uniformity, creating a methodology which challenges existing modes of publication, readership and reception.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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