Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation

by Bart J. Moore-Gilbert

Postcolonial Life-Writing is the first attempt to offer a sustained critique of this increasingly visible and influential field of cultural production.

Bart Moore-Gilbert considers the relationship between postcolonial life-writing and its western analogues, identifying the key characteristics that differentiate the genre in the postcolonial context. Focusing particularly on writing styles and narrative conceptions of the Self, this book uncovers a distinctive parallel tradition of auto/biographical writing and analyses its cultural and political significance.

Original and provocative, this book brings together the two distinct fields of Postcolonial Studies and Auto/biography Studies in a fruitful and much needed dialogue.

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Bart Jason Moore-Gilbert was Professor of Postcolonial Studies and English at Goldsmiths, University of London. He was the author of Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices and Politics, Kipling and “Orientalism”, and editor of Literature and Imperialism, Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s, The Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure?, Writing India: British Representations of India 1857-1990 and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader.