Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism: Race and Identification

Description

This book explores questions of race and identification in writings from the Enlightenment to the present. Drawing on post-colonial theory, it provides close readings of texts by Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison and Tsitsi Dangarembga and highlights the elements of dialogue, exchange and contestation between them. It illustrates how inscriptions of racial crossing - whether between white and black or black and white - are always implicated in a certain textual and/or intertextual politics. Front Matter ....Pages i-vii Introduction (Carl Plasa)....Pages 1-8 ‘Almost an Englishman’: Colonial Mimicry in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. (Carl Plasa)....Pages 9-31 ‘What was done there is not to be told’: Mansfield Park’s Colonial Unconscious (Carl Plasa)....Pages 32-59 ‘Silent Revolt’: Slavery and the Politics of Metaphor in Jane Eyre (Carl Plasa)....Pages 60-81 ‘Qui est là?’: Race and the Politics of Fantasy in Wide Sargasso Sea (Carl Plasa)....Pages 82-97 ‘I is an Other’: Feminizing Fanon in The Bluest Eye (Carl Plasa)....Pages 98-120 ‘The Geography of Hunger’: Intertextual Bodies in Nervous Conditions (Carl Plasa)....Pages 121-145 Back Matter ....Pages 146-172