White – Female – Postcolonial?

Annika McPherson

White - Female - Postcolonial? Towards a 'Trans-cultural' Reading of Marina Warner's Indigo and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible

ISBN 978-3-86821-346-1, 256 S., kt., € 28,50 (2011)

(Inputs – Kritische Beiträge zum postkolonialen und transkulturellen Diskurs, Bd. 3)

White – Female – Postcolonial? explores the (im)possible positions of white women authors in relation to postcolonial discourse. By way of a close analysis of the critical discussions of Marina Warner's Indigo and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, this study conceptualizes these novels as 'medi(t)ations' which are informed by a desire to mediate between the fictionalized subject positions of perpetrators and victims of colonialism, yet arguably remain meditations on cultural difference. However, as both novels take complicity as the very starting point of their imaginative inquiry, they also sound out possibilities beyond the suggested dead-ends of those critical debates which emphasize their rewriting of The Tempest and Heart of Darkness in postmodern, postcolonial or feminist frameworks. White – Female – Postcolonial? offers a complementary, 'trans-cultural' reading strategy that examines the novels' narrative and representational strategies as processes of 'self-othering'. It interrogates the role that cultural vocabularies and strategies of 'authorization' play in their categorization and calls for critical multiperspectivity in the form of 'trans-cultural' discursive dialogues.

Buchvorschau / Inhaltsverzeichnis (pdf)