Books in the Literature, Culture & Identity S. series

By means of contextualized readings, this work argues that autobiographic writing allows an intimate access to processes of colonization and decolonization, incorporation and resistance, and the formation and reformation of identities which occurs in postcolonial space.

This study surveys a wide range of writings and ideas out of Africa by people of African descent on the various ways in which "insiders" and "outsiders", "self" and "otherness" have been imagined and defined from African perspectives. Five interviews with leading writers conclude the book.

Works such a Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" and Peter Carey's "Jack Maggs", which "write back" to classic English texts, offer a paradigm for the relationship between post-colonial writings and the "canon". This study provides an overview of such writing.