Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies

Where now for postcolonial studies? That is the central question in this new volume from one of the field’s most original thinkers. Not so long ago, the driving force behind postcolonial criticism was literary; increasingly, however, many have claimed that the future of postcolonial studies is interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary Measures thoroughly considers this alternative trajectory through the field of postcolonial studies by setting up a series of conversations among these newly postcolonial disciplines—notably geography, environmental studies, history, and anthropology—and literary studies in which the imaginative possibilities of non-Western epistemologies are brought to the fore.

Introduction

Sect. I Literature, Geography, Environment

1 Decolonizing the Map: Postcolonialism, Poststructuralism and the Cartographic Connection 21

2 Unsettled Settlers: Postcolonialism, Travelling Theory and the New Migrant Aesthetics 34

3 Postcolonial Geography, Travel Writing and the Myth of Wild Africa 49

4 'Greening' Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives 64

Sect. II Literature, Culture, Anthropology

5 Anthropologists and Other Frauds 93

6 African Literature and the Anthropological Exotic 106

7 (Post)Colonialism, Anthropology and the Magic of Mimesis 130

8 Maps, Dreams and the Presentation of Ethnographic Narrative 142

Sect. III Literature, History, Memory

9 Philomela's Retold Story: Silence, Music and the Postcolonial Text 155

10 Ghost Stories, Bone Flutes, Cannibal Counter-memory 166

11 Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: The Uses and Abuses of Ned Kelly 182

12 (Not) Reading Orientalism 196

Index 210