Preparing Post-Colonial Literatures

Bringing together a range of critics working in the Hispanic and francophone as well as anglophone postcolonial regions, this book aims to dislocate some of the commonly accepted cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries that have previously informed postcolonial studies. The book aims in particular to reconsider the role of the British Isles in this field and to bridge the gap between postcolonial literatures in English and those written in other languages.

Twenty international contributors from a range of disciplines related to language and literature counteract the tradition of isolated studies of postcolonial literatures in the various imperial European languagesSpanish, French, and English. Linguistic isolationism, say the editors, tends to encourage the reading of postcolonial literatures in relation to the language and culture of the colonial power, thus undervaluing multiple processes of influence and subtly reasserting binary models of colonizer and colonized. A comparative approach, it is hoped, will circumvent such linguistic isolationism. Topics include women's bodies in relation to the Indian partition, hybridity in a poem by black Cuban poet, Excilia Saldaña, and cross-cultural dialogues in the work of the Caribbean writer, Wilson Harris. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray are both Senior Lecturers in English at the University of North London.