Postcolonial Life Narrative

Description

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.

About the Author
Gillian Whitlock is an Australian Research Council professorial fellow at the University of Queensland, where she is currently working on archives of asylum seeker testimony and a new project called 'The Testimony of Things'. She is a graduate of Queen's University and the University of Queensland with a long-standing interest in the 'intimate empire' of postcolonial life writing. Her last book, Soft Weapons is a study of life narrative and the war on terror. She is a member of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and a board member of the Australia India Council.

Reviews

"The introduction of Gillian Whitlocks Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions immediately alerts readers to its impressive scope. The book successfully draws connections between life writing produced and read in disparate places at disparate times by disparate audiences in order to demonstrate the ways in which life writing can articulate the impact of conflicted human subjecthood on bodies, lives, and peoples." - Richard Moran, English Studies in Canada< br /> "Postcolonial Life Narratives makes a truly eye-opening read" - Kerry-Jane Wallart, Commonwealth Essays and Studies< br /> "Postcolonial Life Narratives is both a useful introduction to a topic and an intervention that will provoke future debate and research...Textual absences are, of course, places for scholarship to inhabit. It is to Whitlocks credit that Postcolonial Life Narratives provides a method of inquiry that might be expanded to other texts from different historical periods and also provokes renewed discussion of the intersections of life writing, testimony, and the ongoing legacy of postcolonial studies." - Philip Holden, Biography< br />

Table of contents

Introduction
Part 1: Colonial Testimonial 1789-1852
Part 2: The Passages of testimony: contemporary studies
Afterlives: In the wake of the TRC
Remediation: Rape Warfare and Humanitarian Storytelling
Thresholds of Testimony: Indigeneity, Nation and Narration
The Ends of Testimony
Salvage