Postcolonial Life Writing

At a time when concepts of identity and self-representation are abundant in both literary and cultural studies, Postcolonialsim and Life-Writing, brings together the two increasingly popular and important fields of postcolonial studies and life writing.

At a time when concepts of identity and self-representation are abundant in both literary and cultural studies, Postcolonialsim and Life-Writing, brings together the two increasingly popular and important fields of postcolonial studies and life writing.

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. Postcolonial Life Narrative draws together two dynamic fields of contemporary literature and criticism, postcolonialism and life narrative, to create a new assemblage: postcolonial life narrative. Focusing in particular on testimonial narrative, from slave narrative in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Anglophone life narrative from Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, Palestine, North America, and India, this study follows texts on the move through adaptation, appropriation, and remediation. For postcolonial subjects life narrative offers extraordinary opportunities to present accounts of social injustice and oppression, of violence and social suffering. Testimonial narrative can reach across cultures to produce intimate attachments between those who testify and those who bear witness to legacies of apartheid, slavery, rape warfare, genocide, and dispossession. Thresholds of testimony are subject to change and for some, for example refugees and asylum seekers, opportunities to engage a witnessing public and inspire campaigns for social justice on their behalf are curtailed--these are the 'ends of testimony'. The production, circulation, and reception of testimonial life narrative connects directly to the most fundamental questions of who counts as human, what rights follow from this, and what makes for grievable life. Postcolonial life narrative is a dynamic field of literature and criticism, and this book presents a series of proximate readings that outline its distinctive imaginative geographies.

A watershed moment of the twentieth century, the end of empire saw upheavals to global power structures and national identities. However, decolonisation profoundly affected individual subjectivities too. Life Writing After Empire examines how people around the globe have made sense of the post-imperial condition through the practice of life writing in its multifarious expressions, from auto/biography through travel writing to oral history and photography. Through interdisciplinary approaches that draw on literature and history alike, the contributors explore how we might approach these genres differently in order to understand how individual life writing reflects broader societal changes. From far-flung corners of the former British Empire, people have turned to life writing to manage painful or nostalgic memories, as well as to think about the past and future of the nation anew through the personal experience. In a range of innovative and insightful contributions, some of the foremost scholars of the field challenge the way we think about narrative, memory and identity after empire. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Autobiography, a fully-recognised genre within mainstream literature today, has evolved massively in the last few decades, particularly through colonial and postcolonial texts. By using autobiography as a means of expression, many postcolonial writers were able to describe their experiences in the face of the denial of personal expression for centuries. This book is centred around the recounting and analysis of such a phenomenon. Literary purists often reject autobiography as a fully-fledged literary genre, perceiving it rather as a mere life report or a descriptive diary. The colonial and postcolonial autobiographical texts analysed in this book refute such perceptions, and demonstrate a subtle combination of literary qualities and the recounting of real-life experiences. This book demonstrates that colonial and postcolonial autobiographical texts have established their ‘literarity’. The need for postcolonial authors to express themselves through the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, as subjects and not as objects, is the essence of this book, and confirms that self-affirmation through autobiographical writing is indeed an art form.

Hunger and Postcolonial Writing explores contemporary postcolonial fiction and life-writing from various geo-political contexts. The focus of this work is hunger; individuated in the self-imposed starvation of the hunger protester, and on a mass scale in the form of famine and food insecurity. It considers the hungry colonial and postcolonial body, examines its textual forms and historical trajectories, and situates it within the food security context of imperialism and its legacies. This book is the first monograph-length study of hunger within a postcolonial/world literary context. Its transcolonial focus produces comparative readings across postcolonial writings, facilitating productive analyses of the operations of imperialism and its aftereffects across heterogenous zones of colonialism. This project reads hunger as defined by the social, cultural, historical, and economic engagements produced by colonial and postcolonial encounters. Examining the starving colonialized body through Cartesian models of somatic subjectivity, and considering how this body is mediated by post-Enlightenment discourses of Modernity and progress, this work interrogates the contradictions produced by the starving colonial body as it is positioned between the possibility of radical protest and prescriptive colonial discourse. This book will be of interest to Gastrocritical and Postcolonial scholars and students, and to Food scholars more broadly.

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. Postcolonial Life Narrative draws together two dynamic fields of contemporary literature and criticism, postcolonialism and life narrative, to create a new assemblage: postcolonial life narrative. Focusing in particular on testimonial narrative, from slave narrative in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Anglophone life narrative from Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, Palestine, North America, and India, this study follows texts on the move through adaptation, appropriation, and remediation. For postcolonial subjects life narrative offers extraordinary opportunities to present accounts of social injustice and oppression, of violence and social suffering. Testimonial narrative can reach across cultures to produce intimate attachments between those who testify and those who bear witness to legacies of apartheid, slavery, rape warfare, genocide, and dispossession. Thresholds of testimony are subject to change and for some, for example refugees and asylum seekers, opportunities to engage a witnessing public and inspire campaigns for social justice on their behalf are curtailed—these are the 'ends of testimony'. The production, circulation, and reception of testimonial life narrative connects directly to the most fundamental questions of who counts as human, what rights follow from this, and what makes for grievable life. Postcolonial life narrative is a dynamic field of literature and criticism, and this book presents a series of proximate readings that outline its distinctive imaginative geographies.

This book reconsiders liminality in postcolonial thought by visiting Mashriqi writers of memoir, offering a unique intervention in the understanding of threshold states within postcolonial literary studies. Challenging received perceptions of the concept, Bugeja's incisive readings situate liminal space today as a fraught form of consciousness that mediates between conditions of historical contingency and the volatile memorializing present.