Ebook: Textual politics from slavery to postcolonialism : race and identification

Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism explores questions of race and identification from slavery to the so-called postcolonial present through close readings of texts by Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront︠, Jean Rhys, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Carl Plasa draws attention to the larger networks of dialogue and contestation in which those texts are located: Equiano writes back to an Enlightenment ideology of race as Dangarembga reworks the figurings of the white female body in Charlotte Bront︠. Bront︠ is situated, in turn, between Austen and Rhys, in a narrative of colonial and postcolonial textual responses. Similarly, Morrison, and Dangarembga again, engage, implicitly and explicitly, with the work of Fanon, while at the same time complicating his male-centred critique from African American and African feminist perspectives. In the course of the analysis, the crossings of identification - whether between black self and white Other or white self and black Other - emerge both as sites of political tension and spaces in which psychic and historical realities powerfully collide. Read more...