Abstract
This collection of essays has its origins in a conference on postcolonial literatures entitled ‘Border Crossings’ which was held at the University of North London. The borders which we hoped the conference would traverse and transgress were disciplinary, linguistic and cultural ones. These borders — and the geographical ones which underpin some of them — exist for a variety of reasons; most obviously, of course, the historical, cultural and political legacies of colonialism, such as the identity and language of the colonizing power in a particular part of the world, or the political entities left behind as the empires receded into history. But they are reinforced by other pressures, including pedagogic and institutional demarcations, some of them related to the historical development of academic disciplines, which, as Edward Said and others have shown, are themselves in many cases shaped by the experience and ideologies of empire.1
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Notes
Edward Said, Orientalism ( 1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 ).
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Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: a Derivative Discourse? ( London: Zed Books, 1986 ).
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Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, quoted by Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India ( London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997 ), p. 169.
Chantal Zabus, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel ( Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1991 ).
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures ( London: Verso, 1992 ), p. 98.
Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, ‘What is post(-)colonialism?’, Textual Practice, 5 (1991), pp. 399–414.
Vijay Mishra and Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”’, Social Text 17(Fall 1987), pp. 3–25.
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© 2000 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Bery, A., Murray, P. (2000). Introduction. In: Bery, A., Murray, P. (eds) Comparing Postcolonial Literatures. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599550_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599550_1
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