The Intimate Empire

by Gillian Whitlock

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780304706006
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/01/2000
Series:	Literature, Culture, and Identity Series
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

Gillian Whitlock is an associate professor in the School of Humanities at Griffith University in Brisbane. She has degrees in postcolonial studies from the University of Queensland and Queen's University and has published widely in this area.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgements	vii
	Introduction: In the pink: Empire and autobiography	1
1	Autobiography and slavery: Believing the History of Mary Prince	8
	Black and white	8
	The 'history' of Mary Prince	10
	Marginalia: oppositional reading	12
	Mr Pringle: editor	15
	Miss Strickland: the 'other' woman	17
	Authorization: reading the body of the slave	22
	Volatile bodies	26
	The return of Mary Prince	29
2	Settler subjects	38
	Blood and milk: Roughing It in the Bush	38
	Colonizer and colonized	41
	Grosse Isle, summer 1832	43
	Emigration in the time of cholera	47
	Conduct books: The Backwoods of Canada	52
	Autobiography and adjacency: Mr and Mrs Moodie	56
	Domesticity: the race made flesh	65
3	Travelling in memory of slavery	75
	Britannia's daughters	75
	Jamaica: the legacy of the plantation	79
	The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole	83
	Creole travelling	90
	Mary Gaunt: writing a master narrative	96
	The Buckra lady	102
	Romance and slavery	105
4	Kenya: The land that never was	112
	Finding Karen Blixen	112
	Quartet: Blixen, Simpson, Markham and Huxley	115
	Dystopian autobiography: The Land That Never Was	118
	Autobiography at Independence: The Flame Trees of Thika	124
	Out of Africa: the biography of the white hunter	131
	The new pioneer: West with the Night	134
	Smoke and mirrors	138
5	Autobiography and resistance	142
	Reading across the South	142
	Autobiography after Soweto	146
	Call Me Woman	148
	Black Australian autobiography	154
	Sally Morgan and Ruby Langford Ginibi: the making of Aboriginality	157
	Black writers/white readers	160
	Bodiless women	165
6	In memory of the colonial child	179
	Autobiography and utopia	179
	A Childhood Perceived: Penelope Lively	183
	Under My Skin: Doris Lessing	190
	Rhodesia: the lost world	193
	Accessing the past	198
	Reading across the Straits	200
	Connected reading: the agency of the reader	203
	Select bibliography	207
	Index	221