Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture

From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to the United Nations Permanent Memorial to the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, many worthwhile processes of public memory have been enacted on the national and international levels. But how do these extant practices of memory function to precipitate justice and recompense? Are there moments when such techniques, performances, and displays of memory serve to obscure and elide aspects of the history of colonial governmentality? This collection addresses these and other questions in essays that take up the varied legacies, continuities, modes of memorialization, and poetics of remaking that attend colonial governmentality in spaces as varied as the Maghreb and the Solomon Islands. Highlighting the continued injustices arising from a process whose aftermath is far from settled, the contributors examine works by twentieth-century authors representing Asia, Africa, North America, Latin America, Australia, and Europe. Imperial practices throughout the world have fomented a veritable culture of memory. The essays in this volume show how the legacy of colonialism?s attempt to transform the mode of life of colonized peoples has been central to the largely unequal phenomenon of globalization.

I: Continuities: Neocolonialism and Governmentality; 1: Regarding Self-Governmentality: Transactional Accidents and Indigeneity in Cape York Peninsula, Australia 1; 2: Postcolonial Security, Development, and Biopolitics: Targeting Women’s Lives in Solomon Islands; 3: “Backdoor Entry” to Australia: A Genealogy of (Post)colonial Resentment; 4: Interculturalism, Settler Colonialism, and the Contest Over “Nativeness”; II: Literature and Culture After Colonial Governmentality; 5: “The World is Spoilt in the White Man’s Time”: Imagining Postcolonial Temporalities; 6: Remembering Histories of Care: Clinic and Archive in Anil’s Ghost; 7: Embodied Memories: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Multiple Genealogies in Deborah Miranda’s; 8: Post-Presentational: The Literature of Colonial Memory in Australia and Latin America After Neoliberalism; 9: Sedimented Colonizations in the Maghrebine Writings of Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, and Paul Bowles; 10: Memory is an Archipelago: Glissant, Chamoiseau, and the Literary Expression of Cultural Memory; 11: Precarious/Sense: Memory and the Poetics of Spatial Performance; 12: “Speaking Darwish” in Neoliberal Palestine

Michael R. Griffiths is a lecturer in the School of the Arts, English, and Media at the University of Wollongong NSW.