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This essay creates a heuristic homology between postcoloniality and strains of survivorship whose very contingency "de-humaniz[ es] greed as the primum mobile . . . [and thereby composes] the dangerous supplement, one on one yet collective" (Spivak, "Marx" 281). Using Spivak's attempt to globalize Marx by abjuring epistemological enterprises that privilege "a philosophically correct structural position" (281) at the expense of the subaltern's "right to intellectual labor" (284), this essay reads the phantasms and afflictions of the Scottish diaspora in the 1940s coal-mining town of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, as represented by Sheldon Currie's The Glace Bay Miners' Museum (1996), for a postcoloniality that, in being attuned to what is left of communally viable forms of collective survival, especially as these remain inappropriable by capital, yields proliferative subjectifications of traumatic experience that are capable of eluding the open "secret of the theft of surplus value" (279) by which global capitalism ruthlessly extracts the unraveling of the biosphere as normality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reads Saadat Hasan Manto's short story, "Thanda Gosht" (1950), depicting women's experience of sectarian brutality during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, to delineate the postcolonial significance Gayatri Spivak's concept of originary queerness. Manto's synecdoche ("cold meat") for an unnamed and raped female corpse, her Sikh abductor and violator, as well as for the story's readers, (re)figures reproductive heteronormativity as a process of unknowing that emplaces a gendered taxonomy, even when its victims are silent. Rather than reinforce sexual difference as a Thnished itinerary, however, Kulwant Kaur's repeatedly piercing question-who she is-queers "Thanda Gosht" by taking us to a "she" who we cannot imagine but seem to know. This tarrying with originary queerness "in its place" (Spivak, "Gender" 817, emphases added) dockets an unpredictable futurity made especially resonant by the chill that asseverates from Ishar's Singh's use of a peculiar affective idiom to describe his encounter with the unnamed and raped corpse, whose originary queerness inverts a teleological trajectory to manifest (the fight for) Nation as (visiting) "burre ki ma ka ghar" (बुरे की माँ के घर; the house of Bad's mother). This place, far from patriarchal honor and protection, makes a "zaalim" (ज़ालिम; bloodthirsty) of ("us") all, such that we cannot say what happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spivak refers to "originary queerness" as a concept she cannot yet theorize. If concepts convey and uphold heterogeneous lived experience, then the paradoxical missing-ness of a corresponding "what happened" augurs a form of understanding underived from information retrieval. In this spot lives our undifferentiated experience such that "one cannot imagine what one seems to know." Such imagining of what one (already) seems to know is the task of tarrying with difference "in its place." This essay reads the novel Shame to suggest that the question of originary queerness (what happened?) is an effort to "cross identity" for the heterogeneous. Shame's elite Pakistani women are apertures of difference in its place precisely because their fates are so stereotypically dismal. Instead of what is in the novel – the unequivocal gender coding that renders women monstrous or pure, grotesque or invisible, barren or fertile – they contest the narrator's illocutionary claim that "all stories ha[ve] to end together." Since none epitomize appropriate femininity, they refract sexual difference as lived failure to gesture to (an) un-exceptional originary queerness that does not queer places. In fact, places queer it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]