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Preliminary Material --Introduction /Theo D'haen --(Un)Writing Empire /Theo D'haen --The Overwritten Unwritten: Nationalism and its Doubles in Post-Colonial Theory /Robert J.C. Young --The Caribbean /Theo D'haen --Créolité: Cultural Nation-Building or Cultural Dependence? /A. James Arnold --(Un)Ending Colonialism: Post-Colonial Identities and Postmodern Ambivalence in Edouard Glissant's Mahagony /Chris Bongie --Pre-Text and Con-Text: Re-writing the Caribbean /John Thieme --On the (False) Idea of Exile: Derek Walcott and Grace Nichols /Aleid Fokkema --Asia /Theo D'haen --"Starry Nights": The Novels of Shobha Dé /Rachel Dwyer --Un-writing with the Voice: Orality as a Post-Colonial Literary Apparatus in Malaysian Literature /Muhammad Haji Salleh --H.J. Friedericy and the Indonesian Voice /Peter Van Zonneveld --(De)Romanticizing the Land: Culture and Cultivation in the Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature of the Dutch East Indies /Christine Levecq --Africa /Theo D'Haen --Gordimer contre Hemingway: Crossing Back through the Mirror that Subtends All Speculation /Kenneth W. Harrow --The Yoruba Bacchae: Wole Soyinka's Dearyanization of Greek Civilization /Chantal Zabus --Gide's Africa/Africa's Gide /Ieme Van Der Poel --Language, Identity, and Writing in Francophone Maghreb Literature /Abdellah Bounfour --America /Theo D'Haen --Herman Melville and the Mission of American Empire /Johanna C. Kardux --Un-writing Empire by Writing Oral Tradition: Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony /John Peacock --Timothy Findley's Headhunter: Empire, and Canadian Modernity /Theo D'Haen. The contributors to the present volume, in espousing and extending the programme of such writers as Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, lay bare the genealogy of 'writing' empire (thereby, in a sense, ' un -writing' it). One focus is the Caribbean: the retrograde agenda of francophone créolité ; the re-writing of empire in the postmodern disengagement of Edouard Glissant; resistance to post-colonial allegiances, and the dissolving of binary categories, in contemporary West Indian writing. Essays on India, Malaysia, and Indonesia explore various aspects of cultural self-understanding in Asia: un-writing high culture through hybrid 'shopping' among Western styles; the use of indigenous oral forms to counter Western hegemony; romantic and anti-romantic attitudes towards empire and the land. A shift to Africa brings a study of Nadine Gordimer's feminist un-writing of Hemingway's masculinist colonising narrative, a searching analysis of Soyinka's restoration of ancient syncretic elements in his West African re-visions of Greek tragedy, changing evaluations of the validity of European civilization in André Gide's representations of Africa, and tensions of linguistic allegiance in Maghreb literature. North America, finally, is brought back into the imperial fold through discussions of Melville's re-writing of travel and captivity narratives to critique the mission of American empire, Leslie Marmon Silko's re-territorialization of expropriated Native American oral traditions, and Timothy Findley's representation of Canada's troubled involvement with its three shaping empires (French, British, American)
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