Chères et chers collègues,

La prochaine séance du séminaire « Surveillance Imaginings » aura lieu le lundi 11 mai à 17h30 à la Maison de la recherche, rue Serpente (salle 002).

Nous aurons le plaisir d’accueillir Jaine Chemmachery, maitresse de conférences à Sorbonne Université. Sa présentation s’intitule « « For a few moments there was only a howling noise » : Partial Visibility and Sensory Poetics in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost (2023) ». Vous en trouverez ci-dessous un résumé, ainsi qu’une courte note biographique.

Bien cordialement,

Claire Wrobel et Cécile Beaufils

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This paper aims to analyse how Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost (2023) respectively explore surveillance in post 9/11 Britain and the current Israeli-Palestinian context. In both works, various technologies monitor the movement of criminalised subjects, which often results in their being slowed down, or even immobilised. Both novels explore the ways in which surveillance practices are experienced, even internalised, by various characters but also how they are sometimes countered. Screens may be omnipresent in Shamsie’s novel but the work is fragmented into different sections, each narrated from a character’s point of view in the third person singular, which hinders any totalising grasp of the characters’ subjectivities by the readers. Home Fire depicts a world characterised by « coloniality » (Quijano 2000) but also draws on a multisensory poetics which challenges the ocularcentrism of « colonial and anthropocentric regimes that seek to render environments and bodies fully legible » (Filip 2026). In Hammad’s novel, which represents the trajectories of several Palestinian characters brought together around a new production of Hamlet, the embodied dimension of theatre and a non-linear construction of time, among others, contribute to disrupting hegemonic fantasies of control.

Filip, Loredana, « Dust, Air, and Resistance: Multisensory Aesthetics Against Surveillance in Zia Haider Rahman’s In Light of What We Know » in Stephanie J. Brown (ed.), « Surveillance and Literature », vol. 24, no. 1/2, 2026, pp. 79-88.

Quijano, Anibal, et al. « Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America », International Sociology, vol. 15, no. 2, 2000.

Jaine Chemmachery is a Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial and Diasporic Literatures at Sorbonne Université. She wrote her PhD dissertation on R. Kipling’s and S. Maugham’s short stories on Empire and the relation between colonialism, modernity and the genre of the short story (2013). Her current research focuses on movement, body studies and critical phenomenology. Her latest publications include “Secrecy and Discontinuous Lines of Transmission in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift (2011)” in PLA 3.1 (2025) and “‘He wants me to bring him home, even in the form of a shell’: Criminalised Bodies and Repatriation in K. Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017)” in Judith Misrahi-Barak et al, Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces (Routledge, 2026).