Post Colonial Intertexts

This work is a sedulous enquiry into the intertextual practice of Maryse Condé in Moi, Tituba, sorcière... noire de Salem (1986), Traversée de la mangrove (1989) and La Migration des coeurs (1995), the texts of her oeuvre in which the practice is the most elaborate and discursively significant. Arguing that no satisfactory reading of these novels is possible without due intertextual reference and interpretation, the author analyses salient intertexts which flesh out and, in the case of Traversée de la mangrove, shed considerable new light on meaning and authorial discourse. Whether it be in respect of canonical (William Faulkner, Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne), postcolonial (Aimé Césaire, Jacques Roumain) or other (Anne Hébert, Saint-John Perse) writers, the author explores Condé's intertextual choices not only around such themes as identity, resistance, métissage and errance, but also through the dialectics of race-culture, male-female, centre-periphery, and past-present. As both textual symbol and enactment of an increasingly creolised world, intertextuality constitutes a pervasively powerful force in Condé's writing the elucidation of which is indispensable to evaluating the significance of this unique fictional oeuvre.

An investigation about the way how contemporary post-colonial intertexts take colonialism and euro-modernism to trial.

Transcript of papers presented at a two successive international conferences.

An essential guide to understanding the issues which characterize post-colonialism. A comprehensive glossary has extensive cross-referencing, a bibliography of essential writings and an easy-to-use A-Z format.

In recent years works such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, J.M. Coetzee's Foe and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, which 'write back' to classic English texts, have attracted considerable attention as offering a paradigm for the relationship between post-colonial writing and the 'canon'. Thieme's study provides a broad overview of such writing, focusing both on responses to texts that have frequently been associated with the colonial project or the construction of 'race' (The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness and Othello) and texts where the interaction between culture and imperialism is slightly less overt (Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights). The post-colonial con-texts examined are located within their particular social and cultural backgrounds with emphasis on the different forms their responses to their pre-texts take and the extent to which they create their own discursive space. Using Edward Said's models of filiative relationships and affiliative identifications, the book argues that 'writing back' is seldom adversarial, rather that it operates along a continuum between complicity and oppositionality that dismantles hierarchical positioning. It also suggests that post-colonial appropriations of canonical pre-texts frequently generate re-readings of their 'originals'. It concludes by considering the implications of this argument for discussions of identity politics and literary genealogies more generally. Authors examined include Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Kamau Brathwaite, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Robertson Davies, Wilson Harris, Elizabeth Jolley, Robert Kroetsch, George Lamming, Margaret Laurence, Pauline Melville, V.S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushdie, Djanet Sears, Sam Selvon, Olive Senior, Jane Urquhart and Derek Walcott.

This book on post-colonial theory has a wide geographic range and a breadth of historical perspectives. Central to the book is a critique of the very idea of the 'postcolonial' itself.

Essays on the contribution of African, Caribbean, Asian and diaspora writers to 'English' literature. The 'new' literatures have most commonly been seen as a staging post en route to the current 'post-colonial' era. Yet these literatures and the diverse cultural histories they represent are older than such recent interpretations of them. This collection of essays investigates ways in which we can return to 'reading' these 'new' literatures without falling back on current critical assumptions.