The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought: Storytelling and the Case of Édouard Glissant

About the event

This talk is drawn from my book, The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought, which promises 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—with a particular focus on two crucial 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 critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial, and Global South background both before Barthes’s declaration and in its wake. This talk will draw on the case of Glissant, in particular, as a study in the kind of complications in theories of authorship that were in circulation immediately after Barthes’s provocation. I will then close by turning to the futurity of the debate with an examination of anticolonial critical theory’s uses of the notion of the storyteller and of storytelling in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Bio

Michael Griffiths is an Associate Professor in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the author of The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture (2018) and his essays have appeared in Textual Practice, Settler Colonial Studies, Discourse, Postcolonial Studies, Australian Humanities Review, and many edited books including the Cambridge History of the Australian Novel and the Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel. Griffiths edited the book Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture (2016). He also co-edited a special issue with Bruno Cornellier of Settler Colonial Studies in 2015, titled “Globalising Unsettlement”. With Tanja Dreher he co-edited a special issue of Continuum which offered an account of freedom of speech debates in the late liberal world and which was reprinted as a book in 2021.