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This chapter explores the concept of colonial literature. By placing Victor Segalen's exoticism in a colonial frame, it argues that texts emerging from colonial contact are not necessarily only part of a problematic archive, but can also propose novel solutions to contemporary investigations of colonial history and culture. It locates Segalen's concept of ‘exotisme’ within its contemporary French New Imperialist background whilst at the same time considering its precursory relation to current understandings of representation of otherness within French literature. It contrasts Segalen's early twentieth-century absorption into colonial literature with radically divergent late twentieth-century post-colonial approaches to his work. In assessing Segalen and his aesthetics within their colonial context, this chapter considers the relatively unstudied links of his work with la littérature coloniale, the author's casting as le Kipling français, and his association with the colonial official and ideologue Charles Régismanset.

Derek Walcott’s career attracts the academic notice of scholars interested in English, post-colonial, and classical literatures; Walcott’s oeuvre seems to invite interdisciplinary interest. Engaging scholarship from these perspectives, this chapter argues for a more nuanced understanding of Walcott’s intertextuality in his use of classical literature, and situates his poetic praxis in a post-colonial context. While the chapter refers to various works by Walcott, the primary focus is on the first section of Cul de Sac Valley, a lyric poem from Walcott’s 1987 collection, The Arkansas Testament, and on his 1973 book-length autobiographical poem, Another Life. It argues that Walcott both draws on and overcomes the fragmentation inherent in the psychic anxiety provoked by the post-colonial condition. Walcott does not succumb to the cleavages inherent in the ‘nervous condition’ of colonialism; rather, his poetry bridges the chasm of fragmentation—here rendered as less of a gaping maw than a pool of polysemous inspiration.

This chapter examines the early development of Japanese anthropology and its influence on colonial literature. Western scholars introduced the science of anthropology to Japan in the 1870s and conducted the first scientific investigations into the origins of Japanese people. Within a decade, Japanese scholars “nationalized” this foreign science and brought it to bear on the aboriginal population of Taiwan, which quickly became the first overseas field in which Japanese anthropologists could work. In the next few decades, colonial ethnographers expanded their fieldwork to embrace all of the new territories that fell under Japan's dominion. As a genre of writing about aboriginal societies, ethnography provided a model for the writer Satō Haruo, who traveled to Taiwan in 1920 and became acquainted with the ethnographer Mori Ushinosuke. A few years after he returned to Japan, Satō wrote Machō (Demon Bird), a short story based on a passage in Mori's ethnography. The ethnographer-narrator of “Demon Bird” writes about an episode of persecution in an unnamed barbarian village. At the same time, the story he tells is an allegory about Japanese persecution of Koreans during the Great Kanto Earthquake. “Demon Bird” is a story that uncovers unexpected links between colony and metropolis. The work appeared at a time when criticism of Japan's colonial policies by liberal and reformist intellectuals was at its peak.

This chapter establishes the book's key claim that Scottish colonial literature in the seventeenth century is poised between narratives of possession and dispossession. It introduces the term colonial utopian literature to frame the intricate relationship between colonialism and utopianism in the seventeenth century. The chapter uses the instances of book burnings in Edinburgh and London in 1700 that revolved around Scotland's colonial venture in Darien as a starting point for the discussion to make a case for the centrality of literary texts in the history of Scottish colonialism. In addition, it introduces the historical context of seventeenth-century Scottish colonialism, especially in relation to the emergent British Empire, inner-British power dynamics, and other European imperial projects. On a theoretical level, the chapter enters debates about Scotland's position in colonial and postcolonial studies through its focus on pre-1707 Atlantic literature. It also makes a fresh argument about Atlantic writing contributing to the transformation of utopian literature from a fictional towards a reformist genre.

This chapter traces the journey of the oriental tale to the North-Indian colony as a prose form instrumental to the colonial exercise that refashions Urdu, once an elite, aesthetic register, into a modern vernacular language complete with a “literature” of its own. It examines how orientalists such as William Jones and John Gilchrist invented a modern Muslim identity in North India through the category of “literature.” It focuses, in particular, on Fort William College and its transformative effects on Urdu aesthetics.

This section briefly discusses the place of sixteenth century print medical texts written by authors who resided in colonial Mexico within the larger context of the study of Latin American letters. It stresses the need to maintain a distinction between presence and influence when assessing the significance of their texts within larger cultural traditions, both in the context of colonial writing and as outputs conditioned by the logic of scientific progress moving into the seventeenth century, which saw some of the most widely disseminated sources of the previous era slip into obscurity as new medical findings superseded earlier formulations. The conclusion remarks on the important role played by this group of radicado figures who authored the print medical books of early modern Mexico, considering how they articulated intellectual positions that both anticipated and differed from later criollo responses to colonial mechanisms for marginalisation and exclusion.

Suppose we put on a particular set of glasses and look at colonial fiction with a conceptual history of development in mind, what will we see? Can we read its traces in and through the imagination and narratives that both shaped and reflected the colonial encounter? This chapter takes a close look on a corpus of French, English and African fictional and semifictional literature of the interwar period. Written by colonial servants, missionaries, teachers and anthropologists these texts are marked by the double function of their authors – both storytellers and agents in the processes they tell. Shifting the focus from what the stories tell to how they work as narratives, the chapter shows how an attentive reading of narrative representations and imaginations of processes of development gives insights into how the ideology worked, but also into its contradictions and ruptures.

This chapter explores readings and counter-readings of Homer’s epic The Odyssey in the modern Caribbean. It looks at James Anthony Froude’s metaphorical appropriations, and then moves to discussion of Cyril Lionel Robert James and Derek Walcott, arguing that mythological imagination can constitute a form of knowledge which counters that of the imperial imagination in colonial literature. It reflects on Wilson Harris’s references to the ‘epic strategems available to Caribbean man in the dilemmas of history’ and explores the counter-intuitive idea of ‘arriving in a tradition’ that reorders ethnographic movements and thus sees past traditions as unfinished and carrying into the future. In this model, the Odyssey represents a process in which there is no going back, and in which Homer too has undergone a change-inducing journey. As Odysseus’s most famous stratagem at Troy, the ‘Trojan’ horse is also an excellent metaphor for the uses of Odysseus and The Odyssey in the Caribbean receptions discussed in this chapter.

This chapter focuses on literary and cultural works dealing with Scotland's attempt to colonize Darien, at the Isthmus of Panama, in the 1690s. It establishes Darien as a central trope in Scottish literature by analyzing works from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, including novels, poetry, drama, songs, and political treatises by William Paterson, William Burnaby, Eliot Warburton, Douglas Galbraith, David Nicol, Alistair Beaton, and anonymous female authors. It illustrates how these depictions interact with other political and ideological trajectories in Scotland and the UK, including Jacobitism, Anglo-Scottish relations, and revisionist historical writing. The chapter establishes images of Darien gold and material possession as central structuring devices of Scottish colonial literature, which stand in conflict with depictions of Scotland's alleged kindness towards the indigenous populations of Panama. The chapter argues that narratives of benevolence together with narratives of gold and material possessions turn the colonial utopian tradition into a full-fledged myth of the Scottish Atlantic by the end of the seventeenth century. The mythologization of the colonial sphere together with the mythologization of the Scottish settlers functions as an aesthetic instrument to enter the competition over power in the late-seventeenth-century Atlantic.

This chapter is devoted to Women of Owu, a new adaptation of Euripides’s Trojan Women by the Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan. The play is set outside the burning city, not of Troy, but of Owu in Yorubaland, part of what is now Nigeria. It tells about the sufferings imposed by war. Its main mode is empathy and pity for the victims of war, especially the women. Owu is in ruins, and its former inhabitants are constantly threatened by rape, displacement, slavery, degradation, and death. The chapter first discusses four notable features of the play, all related to the blend of Greek, 19th century Yoruba, and contemporary European/American and, indeed, African elements: its presentation of an aggressive war and its consequences; its emphasis on communality rather than individuality; its treatment of gender; and its form and tone. The chapter also looks at the more abstract audiences constituted by different scholarly disciplines in the context of the interdisciplinary discourse of classics and post-colonial studies.

This chapter examines another important play by Femi Osofisan, Tegonni: An African Antigone. The play is linked to specific issues in post-colonial classical theatre, and explores the paradoxical relationship between the conditions that created the possibility of African rewritings, and those that may in turn subvert the effects. The chapter identifies reasons for the popularity of Antigone in African rewritings, and analyses its double-edged potential for application to African contexts, and not just those of imperial subjection. It examines ways in which the figure of Antigone can straddle myth and history, and allow metatheatrical dimensions to emerge. These are sometimes unexpected, as in Osofisan’s play with its exploration of different forms of colonialism, and its theatrical presentation of Antigone’s arrival, not from ancient Greece via imperial Britain, but on the boat of the Yoruba water goddess.

Literary recognition comprises a good part of the fourth volume of Les Lieux de mémoire, published in 1986. This essay proposes a postcolonial revisiting of literary institutions such as the Académie française or scholarly classics previously addressed in this volume – according to both the chronological and adversarial meanings of the term ‘postcolonial’. It reevaluates the status of those territories that were politically dominated outside the borders of the Hexagon within such realms of literary heritagization by expanding the edges of the nation as it had been envisioned. The French literary canon is home to a range of authors who accepted the colonial order as something that was not to be questioned, and even that should be vigorously defended, but also to writers who were inhabitants of (formerly) colonized territories. The marks of literary prestige obtained by authors from (ex)imperial territories, from the award of a Goncourt Prize to election to the Collège de France, are often determined by decisive conditions, such as the place of publication of literary works, the cultural resources of these writers, and the wider French political environment. This essay highlights the existence of silences and instances of marginalization in national literary heritage, as well as long-term demonstrations of resistance in the face of this colonial or neocolonial order.

Zola’s naturalist novel was the model for the colonial literature that took off from the 1880s. One of the aporia of this literature is that it appears to be based on the idea that the outside world can be understood rationally and described objectively, but at the same time it reveals anxiety concerning threats to the identity of the colonizer and reiterates the cliché of the ‘unknowable other’. This cliché takes varying forms in Romanticism, in the naturalist colonial novel, and then in high modernism. The early- to mid-twentieth-century modernist rejection of Realism led many critics to neglect the important overlap between Realism and modernism. The modernist attack on Realism was reiterated by postcolonial theory, but recently there have been calls to question the modernist rejection of Realism within postcolonial writing in the name of ‘Peripheral Realisms’.

This chapter discusses another post-colonial text that has in its turn become part of the western canon, Athol Fugard’s The Island. The chapter approaches the play via questions about the representation of women. It anchors the discussion in the text of Sophocles’s Antigone and, in so doing, sheds light on why Sophocles is so frequently the author of choice, not only for post-colonial theatre but also for rewritings, in what the chapter argues are continually colonial contexts. The chapter shows how in The Island, Winston enters a Sophoclean world in which political resistance and theatrical womanising are inextricably linked, and where political struggle has to engage with and include what seems weakest, precisely in order to test its convictions and strength.

Fredric Jameson reassured us long ago that ours is a time of the “waning of affect,” since our postmodern age has already dispensed with the “autonomous bourgeois monad.” But in fact we continue to find affect everywhere, if perhaps only as a lingering historical aura. A case in point is the life and writings of Chang Hyŏkchu (1905-97), a Korean who halfway through his life took Japanese citizenship. But that second half mattered little. Chang’s career was essentially coterminous with the Japanese imperial interregnum on the Korean peninsula, lasting from the imposition of the Protectorate in the year of his birth until the defeat of Japan by the Allies on August 15, 1945. He was prolific after the war, as he was before and during it, but his readers would be as absent as the retired utopian fantasy of an East Asia homogenized under Japanese rule.

This chapter concerns two late-nineteenth-early-twentieth-century children's classics, Treasure Island (1883) and Peter Pan (1904), which contain pirate characters of cultural-historical significance as well as enduring popularity: Long John Silver and Captain Hook. Both characters are created from post-Romantic conceptions of boyhood and the evolving literary conventions of piraticalness, but are also intriguing and original, especially Hook, a nostalgic Old Etonian, ‘a pirate who cannot grow up’.