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25 - Postcolonial autobiography in English: The example of Trinidad
- from PART 5 - KINDS OF COMMUNITY (CA. 1930-CONTEMPORARY)
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- By Bart Moore-Gilbert, University of London
- Edited by Adam Smyth, Balliol College, Oxford
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- Book:
- A History of English Autobiography
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 04 April 2016, pp 359-373
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
The roots of postcolonial autobiography in English lie in the eighteenth century, in texts synthesising spiritual autobiography and travelogue – notably Gronniasaw Ukawsaw's A Narrative (ca. 1767) and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789). Not all such texts were ‘slave narratives’, under which rubric they are commonly studied, particularly in the United States. For example, Sake Dean Mohamed's Travels (1794) is a similar mix of autobiography and travelogue by the first man to open an Indian restaurant in Britain and who introduced fashionable society to shampoo. In the nineteenth century, colonised subjects began to produce autobiography across the British Empire, attesting to the rapid consolidation of English as its lingua franca and of colonial education. Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures (1857) is an early example of colonised women's appropriation of a form which was increasingly taken up (by both genders) in the twentieth century. The genre flourished as decolonisation unfolded between the 1940s–1960s, with politicians (for example Nehru, Nkrumah, Lee Kuan Yew) and ordinary citizens alike adapting it for the purposes of ‘national allegory’ – whereby the individual's trajectory towards ‘sovereign selfhood’ parallels his/her nation's towards political sovereignty. Autobiography is now a major strand of postcolonial literatures in English, reflecting both far-reaching changes in once-colonised societies (notably ever-expanding Anglophone middle classes) and a metropolitan readership's (not always benign) desire for ‘native informant’ testimonies about the non-Western world.
This chapter explores two instances of autobiography in English which engage with, and are shaped by, decolonisation and its aftermath. Each addresses perhaps the fundamental cultural/political question faced by postcolonial literatures more broadly – whether narrative forms derived from the coloniser's culture can be used without re-inscribing its (former) authority and prestige. As regards autobiography, the stakes are established by the celebrated critic Georges Gusdorf, for whom the genre has been historically implicated in, if not directly supportive of, colonial values and ideologies. Conversely, he insists that its subsequent deployment by (once-)colonised peoples can only be an imitative activity, demonstrating how successfully colonialism has reshaped their cultural identities (Gusdorf 1980, 29). Anticipating Gusdorf's arguments, M. K. Gandhi – author of perhaps the best-known Indian autobiography (albeit not written in English) – cautioned his fellow colonial subjects against embracing Western autobiography uncritically.
A Concern Peculiar to Western Man? Postcolonial Reconsiderations of Autobiography as Genre
- from Writing Subjectivity, Crossing Borders
- Edited by Patrick Crowley, University College Cork, Jane Hiddleston, University of Oxford
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- Book:
- Postcolonial Poetics
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 30 November 2011, pp 91-108
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Summary
Introduction
Thirty years ago, Fredric Jameson commented of genre criticism that, though ‘thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and practice [it] has in fact always entertained a privileged relationship with historical criticism’ (1981: 105). For Jameson, the potentially progressive political implications of this relationship derive primarily from his conviction that genre is, as his subtitle suggests, ‘a socially symbolic act’ (cf. Frow, 2005: 2, 10–19, 142–44). From this perspective, the task of genre criticism is not ‘neutrally to describe’ (Jameson, 1981: 107) the form in question but to understand it as constructing ‘a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex which can project itself in the form of a “value system”’ (Jameson, 1981: 141). Jameson further insists that deviations from generic norms reveal ‘the historicity of structures’ (1981: 145) by directing attention ‘to those determinate changes in the historical situation which block a full manifestation or replication of the structure [and its “value-system”] on the discursive level’ (1981: 146). Form, then, constitutes ‘the political unconscious’ of the text and it is the politically responsible critic's role to read symptomatically for indices of its relation to social reality and the political forces which configure that reality.
Written before postcolonial literary studies as understood today had properly established itself, Jameson's ‘Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Uses of Genre Criticism’ has played little part in the often heated debate over the field's political credentials.
11 - Kipling and postcolonial literature
- Edited by Howard J. Booth, University of Manchester
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling
- Published online:
- 28 September 2011
- Print publication:
- 01 September 2011, pp 155-168
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Summary
Insofar as postcolonialism is so often used as a synonym for anti-colonialism, one might infer that the relationship between the terms in my title is one of binary opposition rather than negotiation or conjunction. In such a reading (which will be contested in due course), Kipling might be understood simply as a figure whom later non-western writers engage with only to dismiss. There is certainly evidence to support such a reading. Given his long association with India, hostility towards Kipling is, understandably perhaps, especially apparent in the subcontinent and its diasporas, with Kim and The Jungle Books - the main focus of the discussion below - often identified by critics as embodying the most demeaning properties of colonial discourse.
Antipathy to Kipling is perhaps most widely evident amongst later South Asian writers with explicitly nationalist sympathies. An early example of such antipathy is Sarath Kumar Ghosh's epic novel The Prince of Destiny (1909). While never explicitly named, Kipling and his supposed imperial politics are recurrently the object of biting commentary, notably in the denunciations made by the protagonist Barath and his friend Naren, who complains: 'For twenty years [the banjo-poet] and his hundred imitators ... who write of India by his inspiration, have abused us and insulted us most deeply.'