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Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation

Since the 1980s, auto/biography studies and postcolonial studies have moved on parallel tracks in their rise to prominence as interdisciplinary areas of academic inquiry. In the late 1980s and 1990s postcolonial studies forged ahead, supercharged by new theoretical formulations. Lately, it has faded somewhat in visibility, consumed by self-doubt: some of its practitioners have decamped, while others have pondered the limitations it imposes as an intellectual framework for reading literary texts. These dilemmas are illustrated in the titles of a series of recent essay collections: Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson’s Relocating Postcolonialism (2002); Ania Loomba and her co-editors’ Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005); and Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley’s. The Post-Colonial and the Global (2007). Auto/biography studies has proceeded at a more steady pace, gradually strengthening institutional presence and widening its scope of inquiry. In recent years, indeed, the interests of the two interdisciplinary areas appear to be converging. Scholars working in the field of life-writing have become increasingly concerned with auto/biography as a global form, and also the manner in which auto/biographical texts proceed from cultural locations and histories that are influenced by past and present colonialisms. In postcolonial studies, many scholars have moved from the study of literary texts produced by elites to an investigation of more popular publication and reading practices, a trend exemplified by studies such as Priya Joshi’s In Another Country (2002), Stephanie Newell’s Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana (2002) and Robert Fraser’s Book History through