The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's AutobiographyCassell, 2000 - 232 pages By means of contextualized readings, this work argues that autobiographic writing allows an intimate access to processes of colonization and decolonization, incorporation and resistance, and the formation and reformation of identities which occurs in postcolonial space. The book explores the interconnections between race, gender, autobiography and colonialism and uses a method of reading which looks for connections between very different autobiographical writings to pursue constructions of blackness and whiteness, femininity and masculinity, and nationality. Unlike previous studies of autobiography which focus on a limited Euro American canon, the book brings together contemporary and 19th-century women's autobiographies and travel writing from Canada, the Caribbean, Kenya, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. With emphasis on the reader of autobiography as much as the subject, it argues that colonization and resistance are deeply embedded in thinking about the self. |
Contents
Believing the History of Mary Prince | 8 |
Settler subjects | 38 |
Travelling in memory of slavery | 75 |
Copyright | |
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Aboriginal apartheid articulation Australian authentic authority autobiographic narrator autobiographic subject autobiographic writing backwoods black and white black women Blixen body British Call Me Woman Canada Canadian Caribbean Catharine Parr Traill chapter child childhood colonial relations contemporary Creole critical cultural discourses domestic subject Doris Lessing Dreamed of Africa edition in text Ellen Kuzwayo emerged emigration Empire England English example experience femininity feminist Further references Gaunt gendered History of Mary identity imperial indigenous Jamaica John Moodie Kate Llewellyn Kenya Kuzwayo Lessing's London Mary Prince Mary Seacole masculinity memory middle-class Moodie's ongoing politics postcolonial Prince's History Pringle produced race racial reader reading relationship Rhodesia romance Roughing Seacole Seacole's sense settlement settler colonialism settler subjects sexual Sindiwe Magona sketches slave narrative slavery social South Africa Soweto story suggests Susanna Moodie Thika thinking Traill travel writing Trees of Thika truth University Press white women women's autobiography writing scene