Book Launch: The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought

Speakers

Elizabeth McMahon (UNSW), Ben Etherington (WSU), Graham Akhurst (UTS) and Michael Griffiths (UOW)

Abstract

The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought aims to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account – previously unstudied – of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967.

The book is a cultural history of these debates. The book aims to account for the response of decolonial thinkers to the legacy of the death of the author postulate and related poststructuralist assertions. From the emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, this book then moves to explore a series of case studies in decolonial fiction that responds to the legacy of this postulate in both fiction in the immediate aftermath of 1967 and beyond in subsequent, more recent fiction and poetry. Focusing on two key case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South background almost from the get go.

Please RSVP through Humanitix (the event is free).