This study was concerned with providing a wider historical and aesthetic sense of how colonial memory is effected, through which genres it is routed, and in whose interests it is deployed. Through an analysis of Aya Zikken's Terug naar de atlasvlinder, Marion Bloem's Muggen mensen olifanten and Doris Lessing's African Laughter, I have focused on colonial memory in women's travel writing in relation to the specific historical contingencies of the contemporary Dutch and British cultures of colonial remembrance in which they circulate. Firmly anchored within the structures of language and storytelling, the notion of colonial memory deployed in this study builds on cultural theories of memory by Mieke Bal and Andreas Huyssen. It is a textual site where issues of gender and travel writing intersect with dominant discourses of colonial remembrance in Britain and the Netherlands. In so doing, this study has explored and uncovered a series of complexities, tensions and ambivalences in the contemporary return to the colonial era through memory and travel by texts and people in Britain and the Netherlands today. These complicate and nuance some of the conventional assumptions about colonial memory in traditional colonial historiography (colonialism as Europe's closed-off past) and postcolonial approaches in the wake of Edward Said (colonialism as Europe's unrecognised aftermath).

Gender, Power and the Postcolonial Afterlife

Large-scale political and economic realignments in the last decades of the twentieth century accelerated transformations in people's notions of community, in the imagination of new markets, and in the renegotiation of borders and territories. While the national, cultural and ethnic boundaries are increasingly being pressurised in this transnational climate, it is strikingly paradoxical how growing numbers of people feel the desire to return to their past and examine the connections and intersections between their family histories and official national historiographies, including those pertaining to the colonial era. Sometimes these personal genealogical inquiries, in turn, manifest themselves as popular goods on the global market through the Internet, on national television as well as in local libraries and institutes erected for the preservation of cultural heritage.