A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature

This Concise Companion offers an innovative, multi–disciplinary approach to Postcolonial literatures and cultures from 1947 to the present.

In a series of newly–commissioned essays, leading international scholars, including C.L.Innes and Susan Bassnett, seek to explore and explain the ideas and practices that have emerged from the dismantling of European empires, and the impact that these have had on Postcolonial literatures and cultures. This authoritative Companion investigates the key concerns of literature of this period, such as race, culture, and identity; literary and cultural translations; and the politics of resistance. Individual chapters focus on a broad–range of subjects such as identity studies, orality and literacy, nationalisms, feminism, anthropology and cultural criticism, the politics of rewriting, new geographies, publishing and marketing, translation studies.

A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature is an indispensable guide for anyone seeking an authoritative understanding of the intellectual contexts of Postcolonialism.

List of Illustrations vii

Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction 1
Shirley Chew

1 Framing Identities 9
David Richards

2 Orality and Literacy 29

Part 1: India G.N. Devy

Part 2: South Africa Duncan Brown

3 The Politics of Rewriting 56
C.L. Innes

4 Postcolonial Translations 78
Susan Bassnett

5 Nation and Nationalisms 97
John McLeod

6 Feminism and Womanism 120
Nana Wilson–Tagoe

7 Cartographies and Visualization 141
David Howard

8 Marginality: Representations of Subalternity, Aboriginality and Race 162
Stephen Morton

9 Anthropology and Postcolonialism 182
Will Rea

10 Publishing Histories 204
Gail Low

Index 229

Shirley Chew is Emeritus Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds. She has published widely in the field of Postcolonial literatures including the co–edited Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire (1993), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (1999) and Reconstructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission (2001). From 1992–1996 she co–edited The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She is the founding editor Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writing (2001–present).

David Richards is Professor of English Studies and Director of the Centre of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Stirling having previously held posts at the universities of Leeds and Birmingham and at the Open University, where he was the founding Director of the Ferguson Research Centre. His published works include Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (1995) and Urban Generations: Post–colonial Cities (Co–edited with Taieb Balghazi and Taoufik Agoumy, 2005).