Postcolonial Life-Writing

Postcolonial Life-Writing is the first attempt to offer a sustained critique of this increasingly visible and influential field of cultural production. Bart Moore-Gilbert considers the relationship between postcolonial life-writing and its western analogues, identifying the key characteristics that differentiate the genre in the postcolonial context. Focusing particularly on writing styles and narrative conceptions of the Self, this book uncovers a distinctive parallel tradition of auto/biographical writing and analyses its cultural and political significance. Original and provocative, this book brings together the two distinct fields of Postcolonial Studies and Auto/biography Studies in a fruitful and much needed dialogue.

Selected Contents: Introduction 1. Centred and Decentred Selves 2. Relational Selves 3. Embodied Selves 4. Located Selves 5. Inter-Generic Traffic in Postcolonial Life-Writing 6. Non-western Narrative Resources in Postcolonial Life-Writing 7. The Cultural Politics of Postcolonial Self-Representation. Conclusion