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Postcolonial Life-Writing

The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing: New Contexts, New Narratives, New Debates, 2018
Postcolonial life-writing comprises texts ranging from personal narratives by colonizers, travelers and the enslaved, to archival documents such as letters and journals, to recent accounts of individual and community life experiences. Scholars such as Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, and Julie Rak have commented on the ‘boom’ in life-writing in the UK and North America in the last twenty-five years. Postcolonial writers have participated in this boom, creating luminous reworkings of the genre. Life narratives by writers such as Marjane Satrapi, Patrick Chamoiseau, Binyavanga Wainaina, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Lorna Goodison,,and Dionne Brand, to name a very few, tell new narratives of personal experience interwoven with global perspectives on colonialism, independence movements, and the emergence of postcolonial nations. I argue that postcolonial life-writing, embedded as it is in generic expectations of telling a ‘true’ story, can serve as a proving ground for some of the central debates and themes within postcolonial studies. These include: issues of truth and authenticity, reworkings of European genres, showing the gendered nature of nationalism, the importance of the bildungsroman, and as a narrative way to theorize history and memory. ...Read more
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NOTICE CONCERNING COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS The material copied here may be protected by copyright law in the United States and/or in other jurisdictions. This copy was made in compliance with U.S. copyright law and is provided to you for the purposes of private study, scholarship, or research. If you use the copy for a different purpose, such as posting on a course website, the copyright analysis that supported making the copy does not apply. It is your responsibility to address copyright for any other uses. For assistance, you may wish to consult the library’s guides to Copyright Basics and Copyright and Course Websites. You can also contact the University of Michigan Library Copyright Office at copyright@umich.edu.
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