AustLit

'Gillian Whitlock's Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions is a timely intervention in the field of postcolonial life writing. Packed with well-researched scholarship and structured in two parts, the book critically addresses some ‘enduring questions on the limits of humanity and humanitarianism, and the “ends” of testimony' (202) through the transaction of testimonial life narratives within a postcolonial discursive frame. Bringing into a productive dialogue between two dynamic fields of contemporary engagement, postcolonialism and life writing, the book ‘mark[s] out a field of postcolonial life writing' (1) exhibiting a significant import of scholarship from some key texts like Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's Reading Autobiography, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith's Human Rights and Narrated Lives, Margaretta Jolly's Encyclopedia of Life Writing, Bart Moore-Gilbert's Postcolonial Life-Writing, and Graham Huggan's edited Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. The book also works through some of the key ideas of thinkers like Franz Fanon, Robert Young, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, and Gayatri Spivak, among others. It thus attempts to capitalise on a cross-disciplinary dialogue and scholarship that has started to emerge recently in the critical work of feminist and postcolonial scholars around ‘de/colonising the subject', specifically the critique of what Marlene Kadar, Jeanne Perreault, and Linda Warley in their special issue introduction of the journal ARIEL call, ‘the “Western man” model of autobiography' (1), to accommodate and engage with many other contending genres of life narratives in diverse cultural locations. It is not surprising to witness such a critical move as the origin of autobiography is very often located in the European Enlightenment and the Enlightenment brand of humanism is associated with the ‘auto' of autobiography and its authority. Gillian Whitlock makes a very powerful observation here: ‘autobiography … is now generally reserved for a literary canon that privileges a specific Enlightenment archetype of selfhood: the rational, sovereign subject that is conceived as western, gendered male, and … racially white' (2–3). This critique of ‘“autobiography” as a fixed genre of reference’, as Smith and Watson maintain, has given way to ‘other popular genres of contemporary life narrative, including online forms and graphic memoir, testimonial writing and autoethnography, film and video, and installation art' (14).'  (Introduction)