Decolonizing the Literary Imagination

What do we mean by ‘dialogue’? What can the use of dialogue tell us about a text, its author, and the larger cultural or political climate of the author’s production? This book examines the notion of dialogue adapted from the work of Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, who elaborated a critical methodology for interpreting the East–West postcolonial encounter. His concept is further complicated by issues of race, gender, class, nationality, and ethnic and religious identity that proliferate in such contexts and serves to reconfigure the power dynamics that characterize these encounters. This study explores dialogue in a selection of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century ethnography, fiction, and travel writing by authors as diverse as Laura Bohannan, Ryszard Kapuściński, Amitav Ghosh, V. S. Naipaul, and Zadie Smith, set in Africa, India, and Europe. These dialogues are viewed through the lenses of phenomenology, history, the philosophy of language, and postcolonial theory. The book also explores how these writing genres have evolved over time in correspondence with crucial historical transitions.