Postcolonialism: South/African Perspectives

This collection poses two overarching questions, Is there a role for the literary imagination in postcolonial studies? And where may one locate South Africa or, more generally, South/African perspectives, in a field delineated primarily by northern institutional purposes and practices? While engaging with contemporary debates the essays seek to turn current postcolonial emphases on theoretical formulations and issue driven interpretation towards the subjective experience of literary texts in specific contexts. The Introduction, Postcolonialism: A Literary Turn, suggests a template of late postcolonialism beyond empires writing back to the centre. Instead, ongoing challenges include settler identity, past and present; independent or compromised African/diasporic voices; the character of the postcolony in which the pre-modern, modern, and postmodern contest a single though heterogeneous place, or space; and the voicing of the silent subaltern alongside the postcolonialising of Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. Despite the utopian political pronouncements of many postcolonial projects (the Wests own undoing) this collection wishes to stimulate usstudents, academicsto see afresh, and comparatively, across worlds. In this, a literary turn may achieve an ethical dimension.