Textual politics from slavery to postcolonialism : Race and identification / Carl Plasa.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. 'Almost an Englishman': Colonial Mimicry in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself -- 2. 'What was done there is not to be told': Mansfield Park's Colonial Unconscious -- 3. 'Silent Revolt': Slavery and the Politics of Metaphor in Jane Eyre -- 4. 'Qui est la?': Race and the Politics of Fantasy in Wide Sargasso Sea -- 5. 'I is an Other': Feminizing Fanon in The Bluest Eye -- 6. 'The Geography of Hunger': Intertextual Bodies in Nervous Conditions.

"Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism explores questions of race and identification from slavery to the so-called postcolonial present through close readings of texts by Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison and Tsitsi Dangarembga.

Carl Plasa draws attention to the larger networks of dialogue and contestation in which those texts are located: Equiano writes back to an Enlightenment ideology of race as Dangarembga reworks the figurings of the white female body in Charlotte Bronte. Bronte is situated, in turn, between Austen and Rhys, in a narrative of colonial and postcolonial textual responses. Similarly, Morrison, and Dangarembga again, engage, implicity and explicitly, with the work of Fanon, while at the same time complicating his male-centred critique from African American and African feminist perspectives.

In the course of the analysis, the crossings of identification - whether between black self and white Other or white self and black Other - emerge both as sites of political tension and spaces in which psychic and historical realities powerfully collide."--BOOK JACKET.