The Catastrophist Summary

The presentation our group was assigned was on The Catastrophist. The areas we covered were colonization, decolonization and the relation to Irish history. After a meeting and some discussion the article chosen was 'Does a Man Die at Your Feet...' Gender, History, and Representation in "The Catastrophist" by Patricia Coughlan. This article was chosen because it covered the topics we were interested in as a group. Ariel focused on colonial theory in the novel, Caitriona focused on comparing the Congo to the Irish Troubles and my focus was on the representation of decolonization and injustice in the novel. Bennett’s novel make use of allegory and parallels in dealing with political issues. The Catastrophist, deals with the Belgian Congo on the eve of independence while also highlighting issues of legal injustice.

In 1994, Bennett spoke out about British attitudes to the Northern Ireland situation and how they depoliticized it. He argued against an ‘apolitical vision’ of ‘mainstream artistic mediators’ of the Northern Irish conflict and the largely middle-class audience they serve. This attitude is in contrast …show more content…
The tone of the novel, though it draws comparison and allusion to the situation in Ireland, is also disparaging of colonialism in a general sense. Bennett wrote the novel from the perspective of the colonizers, and shows European and American problems with the decolonization of Africa (Coughlan, 384). Researching this aspect of the novel led to my researching areas of the Congo Crisis and Ludo De Witte’s article on the murder of Lumumba. The articles I read to research the Congolese historical aspects alluded to were “Unilateral Intervention in the Congo and its Political” by John A. Marcum and Eisenhower, Nkrumah and “The Congo Crisis” by Ebere Nwaubani. In my section of the presentation I briefly discussed the history of the Congo