Postcolonial Past & Present: Negotiating Literary and Cultural Geographies

In Postcolonial Past & Present twelve outstanding scholars of literature, history and visual arts look to those spaces Epeli Hau’ofa has insisted are full not empty, asking what it might mean to Indigenise culture. A new cultural politics demands new forms of making and interpretation that rethink and reroute existing cultural categories and geographies. These ‘makers’ include Mukunda Das, Janet Frame, Xavier Herbert, Tomson Highway, Claude McKay, Marie Munkara, Elsje van Keppel, Albert Wendt, Jane Whiteley and Alexis Wright. Case studies from Canada to the Caribbean, India to the Pacific, and Africa, analyse the productive ways that artists and intellectuals have made sense of turbulent local and global forces.

Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, Debnarayan Bandyopadhyay, Anne Brewster, Diana Brydon, Meeta Chatterjee―Padmanabhan, Anne Collett, Dorothy Jones, Kay Lawrence, Russell McDougall, Tekura Moeka’a, Tony Simões da Silva, Teresia Teaiwa, Albert Wendt, Lydia Wevers, Diana Wood Conroy

Anne Collett is an Associate Professor of English Literatures at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is former editor of Kunapipi: journal of postcolonial writing & culture, and author of numerous essays on Caribbean, Australian and Canadian poetry.

Leigh Dale is Honorary Professor of English at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and author of books on self harm and the history of teaching English literatures in universities, as well as essays on postcolonial literatures (mainly Australian).