'Postcolonial Life Narrative draws together two dynamic fields of contemporary literature and criticism, postcolonialism and life narrative, to create a new assemblage: postcolonial life narrative. Focusing in particular on testimonial narrative, from slave narrative in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Anglophone life narrative from Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, Palestine, North America, and India, this study follows texts on the move through adaptation, appropriation, and remediation. For postcolonial subjects life narrative offers extraordinary opportunities to present accounts of social injustice and oppression, of violence and social suffering. Testimonial narrative can reach across cultures to produce intimate attachments between those who testify and those who bear witness to legacies of apartheid, slavery, rape warfare, genocide, and dispossession. Thresholds of testimony are subject to change and for some, for example refugees and asylum seekers, opportunities to engage a witnessing public and inspire campaigns for social justice on their behalf are curtailed—these are the 'ends of testimony'. The production, circulation, and reception of testimonial life narrative connects directly to the most fundamental questions of who counts as human, what rights follow from this, and what makes for grievable life. Postcolonial life narrative is a dynamic field of literature and criticism, and this book presents a series of proximate readings that outline its distinctive imaginative geographies.' (Publication summary)
'Gillian Whitlock's Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions is a timely intervention in the field of postcolonial life writing. Packed with well-researched scholarship and structured in two parts, the book critically addresses some ‘enduring questions on the limits of humanity and humanitarianism, and the “ends” of testimony' (202) through the transaction of testimonial life narratives within a postcolonial discursive frame. Bringing into a productive dialogue between two dynamic fields of contemporary engagement, postcolonialism and life writing, the book ‘mark[s] out a field of postcolonial life writing' (1) exhibiting a significant import of scholarship from some key texts like Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's Reading Autobiography, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith's Human Rights and Narrated Lives, Margaretta Jolly's Encyclopedia of Life Writing, Bart Moore-Gilbert's Postcolonial Life-Writing, and Graham Huggan's edited Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. The book also works through some of the key ideas of thinkers like Franz Fanon, Robert Young, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, and Gayatri Spivak, among others. It thus attempts to capitalise on a cross-disciplinary dialogue and scholarship that has started to emerge recently in the critical work of feminist and postcolonial scholars around ‘de/colonising the subject', specifically the critique of what Marlene Kadar, Jeanne Perreault, and Linda Warley in their special issue introduction of the journal ARIEL call, ‘the “Western man” model of autobiography' (1), to accommodate and engage with many other contending genres of life narratives in diverse cultural locations. It is not surprising to witness such a critical move as the origin of autobiography is very often located in the European Enlightenment and the Enlightenment brand of humanism is associated with the ‘auto' of autobiography and its authority. Gillian Whitlock makes a very powerful observation here: ‘autobiography … is now generally reserved for a literary canon that privileges a specific Enlightenment archetype of selfhood: the rational, sovereign subject that is conceived as western, gendered male, and … racially white' (2–3). This critique of ‘“autobiography” as a fixed genre of reference’, as Smith and Watson maintain, has given way to ‘other popular genres of contemporary life narrative, including online forms and graphic memoir, testimonial writing and autoethnography, film and video, and installation art' (14).' (Introduction)
'Gillian Whitlock's Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions is a timely intervention in the field of postcolonial life writing. Packed with well-researched scholarship and structured in two parts, the book critically addresses some ‘enduring questions on the limits of humanity and humanitarianism, and the “ends” of testimony' (202) through the transaction of testimonial life narratives within a postcolonial discursive frame. Bringing into a productive dialogue between two dynamic fields of contemporary engagement, postcolonialism and life writing, the book ‘mark[s] out a field of postcolonial life writing' (1) exhibiting a significant import of scholarship from some key texts like Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's Reading Autobiography, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith's Human Rights and Narrated Lives, Margaretta Jolly's Encyclopedia of Life Writing, Bart Moore-Gilbert's Postcolonial Life-Writing, and Graham Huggan's edited Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. The book also works through some of the key ideas of thinkers like Franz Fanon, Robert Young, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, and Gayatri Spivak, among others. It thus attempts to capitalise on a cross-disciplinary dialogue and scholarship that has started to emerge recently in the critical work of feminist and postcolonial scholars around ‘de/colonising the subject', specifically the critique of what Marlene Kadar, Jeanne Perreault, and Linda Warley in their special issue introduction of the journal ARIEL call, ‘the “Western man” model of autobiography' (1), to accommodate and engage with many other contending genres of life narratives in diverse cultural locations. It is not surprising to witness such a critical move as the origin of autobiography is very often located in the European Enlightenment and the Enlightenment brand of humanism is associated with the ‘auto' of autobiography and its authority. Gillian Whitlock makes a very powerful observation here: ‘autobiography … is now generally reserved for a literary canon that privileges a specific Enlightenment archetype of selfhood: the rational, sovereign subject that is conceived as western, gendered male, and … racially white' (2–3). This critique of ‘“autobiography” as a fixed genre of reference’, as Smith and Watson maintain, has given way to ‘other popular genres of contemporary life narrative, including online forms and graphic memoir, testimonial writing and autoethnography, film and video, and installation art' (14).' (Introduction)
