Convivial Violence: Contemporary Transnational Literature of Care and Social Control

Abstract

Conviviality, a term usually connoting cheerfulness, has become an explanatory term that returns to its etymological roots, “living together,” that refers to an extant multicultural and diverse coexistence. Focusing on the human capacity to manage living with difference, everyday interactions are central to an analytic and thematic concept of conviviality. Because conviviality is an inherently optimistic term, the inequities latent in the pursuit of conviviality have been significantly under-investigated. This project turns to feminist care ethics, critical race and queer theories, and postcolonial and transnational studies to understand how the valuation of relationships and care required by convivial living can be violent to certain subjects. Hence, Convivial Violence explores the violent intersection of conviviality and care in contemporary transnational literature. This study proposes the concept of “convivial violence” to describe the naturalized ethical expectation to maintain individual and social relations in the form of care. The social practices of care, from mundane care labor to cosmopolitan coexistence, can be violent in their effects: not in the obvious modes of war or crime, but in the invisible modes of injustice and inequity, which can themselves have equally deleterious impacts. This project treats with nuance the conditions of convivial violence in which minoritized subjects (i.e., women, migrants, and queer subjects) cannot articulate feelings of injustice. The works produced by Kazuo Ishiguro, Han Kang, Ruth Ozeki, Deann Borshay Liem, Tomer Heymann, Arundhati Roy, Michael Ondaatje, and Mohsin Hamid present the vast differences of Asian transnational experience, cohering around accommodating the expectation projected onto Asians and their labor in the service of cohabitation. These authors present the costs of care, shifting our attention from the expectation of convivial labor to the violations it imposes on care workers in various roles. Collectively, addressing the concept of convivial violence sheds light on the tensions and differences necessary to create that normality.