AustLit

Tiffin focuses 'on two apparently different yet related topics: the role of education in colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonized cultures, and post-colonial representations of this literary education and its formative and persisting roles in colonization'.

Slemon picks out some of the major debates in the field of post-colonial literary criticism, a field that emerged out of initiatives taken under the aegis of Commonwealth literary studies and/or New Literatures in English. He focuses on the manner in which a number of theoretical strands have been debated within the field. These strands include 'reading for resistance', the work produced by the Subaltern Studies collective, Orientalism and colonial discourse analysis and 'the new cultural politics of difference'.

This relatively early survey of diasporic literature touches on the work of Indo-Fijian-Australian writers, Sudesh Mishra and Satendra Nandan, amongst many others. For Ramraj the key characteristic of diasporic writing is its display of an attachment to the 'homeland'. Towards the end of essay Ramraj attempts to define how the category of diasporic writing differs from its counterparts, 'immigrant writing or exile and expatriate writing'.

The literary works produced by the Aboriginal Australian writers listed is compared to that of Jeannette Armstrong and Thomas King in Canada and Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme and Alan Duff in New Zealand. Shoemaker briefly examines and compares a number of anthologies, suggesting that the life-story genre, popular in the 1970s, has been followed by 'the anthologizing of aboriginal people' from the mid-1980s onwards.