Literature and Decolonization

The recasting of decolonization through the lens of cultural agents demands a recognition that a key element of the process of uncoupling colonizer and colonized involves the imagination (or re-imagination) of postcolonial futures. These practices take place in novels, poetry, and theatre as much as they do in law, philosophy, or political theory. An expanded focus on the cultures of decolonization emphasizes, at the same time, the transnational networks on which colonized cultures depend as they seek to decolonize, highlighting the cross-cultural and often intercontinental exchanges and translations of ideas and representations which make up the literary and cultural dimensions of decolonization. This chapter analyses the ways in which different forms of writing, particularly fiction, provide insights into the critical yet neglected question of how the end of empire was narrated by those who lived through it and who later, in various ways, sought to reconcile themselves to it.

Aesthetics · Art · Decolonization · Element (criminal law) · Empire · Epistemology · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

• The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire

  Andrew Thompson, Sarah Elizabeth id_orcid Stockwell et al.•Oxford Handbook of the Ends of…•2017

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