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. |
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Aboriginal apartheid Australian authentic authority autobiographic narrator autobiographic subjects autobiographic writing autobiography backwoods Black Consciousness black women Blixen body British Call Me Woman Catharine Parr Traill chapter child childhood colonial relations contemporary critical cultural discourses domestic Doris Lessing Dreamed of Africa edition in text Ellen Kuzwayo emerged emigration Empire English European example experience farm femininity feminist Finch-Hatton Flame Trees Further references Gallmann's Gaunt gendered History of Mary Huxley identity indigenous Jamaica Kate Llewellyn Kenya Kuzwayo Land That Never Langford Ginibi's Lessing's London Magona Markham Mary Prince Mary Seacole memoir memory Moodie's narrative ongoing politics postcolonial present Prince's History produced race racial reader reading relationship Rhodesia romance safari Seacole sense settlement settler colonialism sexual Sindiwe Magona slave slave narrative slavery social South Africa Soweto stories Strickland suggests Susanna Moodie Thika travel writing Trees of Thika tropes truth University Press white hunter white women women's autobiography