Re-writing the Canon: Aspects of Identity Reconstitution in Postcolonial Contexts

This book is concerned with ethnocentric/colonial representations of Europe's Other, and with postcolonial re-writings and subversions of such representations. It consists of a critical study of a cluster of canonical literary texts and Orientalist pictorial representations, and a critical assessment of a variety of postcolonial/resistance works writing back to these canonical texts and representations. Part of my concern with the colonial texts lies with what I consider to be sites of ambiguity in ethnocentric/colonial discourse. In my study of the postcolonial texts, emphasis is on the distinct oppositional strategies used by postcolonial writers in their subversive re-writings of colonial texts, and the different perspectives they adopt in their attempts at re-constituting and re-presenting postcolonial cultural identity and the Self from a position of oppositional, postcolonial historical and cultural consciousness.