The Intimate Empire : Reading Women's Autobiography
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 autobiog
1 online resource (241 pages)
9781847142405, 1847142400
1049914838
Acknowledgements
Introduction: In the pink: Empire and autobiography
1 Autobiography and slavery: Believing the History of Mary Prince
Black and white
The 'history' of Mary Prince
Marginalia: oppositional reading
Mr Pringle: editor
Miss Strickland: the 'other' woman
Authorization: reading the body of the slave
Volatile bodies
The return of Mary Prince
2 Settler subjects
Blood and milk: Roughing It in the Bush
Colonizer and colonized
Grosse Isle, summer 1832
Emigration in the time of cholera
Conduct books: The Backwoods of Canada. Autobiography and adjacency: Mr and Mrs Moodie
Domesticity: the race made flesh
3 Travelling in memory of slavery
Britannia's daughters
Jamaica: the legacy of the plantation
The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole
Creole travelling
Mary Gaunt: writing a master narrative
The Buckra lady
Romance and slavery
4 Kenya: The land that never was
Finding Karen Blixen
Quartet: Blixen, Simpson, Markham and Huxley
Dystopian autobiography: The Land That Never Was
Autobiography at Independence: The Flame Trees of Thika. Out of Africa: the biography of the white hunter
The new pioneer: West with the Night
Smoke and mirrors
5 Autobiography and resistance
Reading across the South
Autobiography after Soweto
Call Me Woman
Black Australian autobiography
Sally Morgan and Ruby Langford Ginibi: the making of Aboriginality
Black writers/white readers
Bodiless women
6 In memory of the colonial child
Autobiography and utopia
A Childhood Perceived: Penelope Lively
Under My Skin: Doris Lessing
Rhodesia: the lost world
Accessing the past
Reading across the Straits. Connected reading: the agency of the reader
Select bibliography
Index
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