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Introduction: differences and analogies

In past issues the US editorial team of Postcolonial Studies have published themed issues (Cyprus and science studies being two examples) where the editors’ introduction basically wrote itself*the theme offering a cohesive narrative that brought the various contributions into conversation. In this non-themed issue any pretension to providing an overarching unifying voice would be forced and artificial, especially in light of the eclectic range of pieces we have put together for this volume: articles which span geographical spaces as diverse as Africa, China, Australia, Brazil and India; which appeal to multiple methods from close textual readings, history, science studies and political theory; and which pursue concerns as varied as contemporary race politics in Australia, cartographical imaginings in India, political language in Gramsci, human rights discourse in an international framework, the postcolonial novel in Africa, and the haunting memories of slavery in Brazilian postcolonial literature. We begin with Patrick Brantlinger’s article ‘Notes on the postmodernity of fake(?) Aboriginal literature’. While a common representation of Aboriginality in Australia plays to images of disorder, addiction, corruption and abuse, Brantlinger’s essay alerts us to an equally ubiquitous set of representations: an Aboriginality fused with Dreamtime, authenticity, the ‘bush’ and spiritual wisdom. These particular allusions found their most theatrical expression during the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games but they are no less evident in the field of literature. What is striking, however, is the inherent tension this literature exposes: if a romanticized indigenous authenticity is an essential feature of the commodification and marketing of Australian Aboriginality, also inherent to the postmodern condition, Brantlinger argues, is the impossibility of formulating absolute, stable identities. The promise of authenticity is always compromised by the elusiveness of postmodern identities. Through the language of ‘fakery’ and ‘hoax’ Brantlinger navigates the growing literature on, about and by Aboriginals, revealing in the process the inherent instability and fractured, contested and fraught nature of any appeals to authentic, ‘pure’ identities. From some of the classic works that have defined the genre of indigenous literature we turn to a canonical postcolonial African novel: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. A text that has been a mainstay of undergraduate American college curricula is the subject of Emad Mirmotahari’s efforts in ‘History as project and source in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart’ to rethink the interrelationship between history, literature, colonialism, culture and the postcolonial moment. As Mirmotahari argues, efforts to divorce history from literature are continually frustrated in Achebe’s novel: ‘Like the early English novels in the eighteenth century, Things Fall Apart is multi-discursive. . . collating Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 351 353, 2011