Postcolonial Nostalgias Writing, Representation and Memory [Hardcover]

This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread, yet often misunderstood, condition  nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national, historical, and personal boundaries. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world, and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of Bushman song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.

Preface and Acknowledgments 1: Introductory: The Persistence of Nostalgia 2: How is it going Mr Naipaul?: Remembering Postcolonial Identites 3: The Broken String: Remembering the Homeland 4: Alone in a Landscape: Remembering Doris Lessings Africa 5: Recalling the Hidden Ends of Empire: W.G. Sebald 6: Remembering bitter histories: From Achebe to Adichie 7: Nostalgia for the Present: J.G. Ballards Empire of the SunEndnote Notes Bibliography Index

Postcolonial Nostalgiasis an ambitious and riveting work of literary criticism, spanning more than a century of realistic writing and thematically connecting postcolonial representations of Trinidad/West Indies, tlƒG