1Since reconciliation is a central issue in postcolonial societies, it is undeniably a fundamental concern in the literatures which emerge from them. As Brian Wallis has remarked, ‘it is not that representations possess an inherently ideological content but that they carry out an inherently ideological function in determining the production of meaning’ (Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, p. xv). Like other contestatory literatures on the margins of dominant culture, postcolonial literature is ‘writing out of the condition of Otherness’ (The Empire Writes Back, p. 78). Whether it be artistic production in Australia, Ireland, South Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, or Canada one can detect the same processes at work. These writers continually affirm their engagement with history and ideology, and never cease to underscore the relationship between the political and the aesthetic. Like their postmodern contemporaries, they interrogate the role of public and private memory, positing that the conjunction of the past and the present allows us to question how we construct and make sense of our culture. The texts that this issue of Commonwealth examines move from representations of colonialism to those of postcolonialism, and from nationalism to postnationalism, through processes of interaction and hybridisation. The writing tends to be strongly metaphorical, even allegorical, rooted in the Romantic mode linking the universal and the particular. Familial histories are thus social histories in these texts which strive to reconcile binary opposites by practising doubleness, occupying liminal zones, and celebrating plurality and hybridity.

2Georges-Goulven Le Cam studies the ideological legitimisation of colonialism through art, showing how British artist T. Gosse deviated from the standard pattern of his late XVIIIth century contemporaries that represented the relationship of civilisation and aboriginality as antagonistic. He analyzes the formal composition of Gosse’s print as well as the iconographical codes that regulate it in order to construct meaning: essentially the emergence of a new paradigm of ethnocultural representation. The Noble Savage has been expelled from the Garden, but the colonists’ transformation of the Australian environment is presented as a divine instrument of order and harmony, a dynamics of integration rather than of opposition.

3The next two essays also study the relationship between poetics and politics in the issues of transition, focussing on South African post-apartheid novels. Richard Samin examines literary texts that have integrated into their discursive strategies certain mechanisms of the discourse and practices of a nation-building drive rooted in a dynamics of conjunction and unification. He posits that post-apartheid fiction has self-reflexively questioned its own language and patterns in order to find its place in a sociopolitical environment also re-examining its history and cultural values and assumptions, and seeking to transcend past divisions and strife along with their legacy of guilt and revenge. He argues that ambivalence, liminality, and the carnivalesque are the major discursive modes which shape the perceptions of the transitional period, and remarks notably that these writers subvert literary conventions and interweave the urban tradition of realism with the ancient rural tradition of orality. Such hybridity effectively challenges divisions produced by centuries of colonisation, and articulates the need for new conjunctive patterns. Benaouda Lebdai examines the allegorical underpinnings of Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace, as well as its dominant mode of intertextuality, which situates the text in an international (albeit overwhelmingly European) historical and literary framework, and provides it with a cultural and ideological overcoding that calls attention both to the significant sequences in the narrative and, on a larger scale but in parallel, to certain new political realities of the South African post-apartheid context, such as the often brutal struggle over land. Geetha Ganapathy-Doré offers a similar parallel between the factual and the fictional, between micro and macro social and geopolitical elements in India’s historical course towards freedom. She studies a novel that spans a century and a half of Indian history and allegorically highlights the role of imperialism as a catalyzer of change in a traditional society. She posits that revenge rather than reconciliation is the cornerstone of the Indian ethos, and argues that the domestic clashes of the narrative are small scale representations of national and international conflicts.

4Dominique Dubois shifts the stage to the New World, and studies a fictional exploration of its history, from colonisation to the independence of the Caribbean. The strongly allegorical text that he analyzes is a generic hybridisation dominated by the carnivalesque mode reminiscent of the South African fiction examined by Richard Samin. A fusion of novel and tale, Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom interrogates the role of memory and the imagination in reconstructing official history into a meaningful pattern. The fictional characters whose story Scott traces are metaphorical incarnations of the process of colonisation and guilt of a prelapsarian world gone awry, and the emergence of a new, ethnically diverse postcolonial society. Emilio lppolito too offers a metaphorical reading of Caribbean literature, focussing on the creolisation of language and culture in the construction of identity in postcolonial Jamaica. She argues that the fictional socialization of Erna Brodber’s protagonist stands for the complex make-up of Jamaica’s hierarchies of ethnicity, class, and gender, produced by a fusion of apparently polarized races, religions, and sociocultural legacies. She shows how communities interact, each with its own set of cultural and linguistic patterns, and posits that the mode underpinning the initially fractured narrative structure is code-switching and, in particular, the dub version: an evolution of reggae that is one of the paradigms of creolisation.

5The final section of this issue shifts from the peripheral situation of the colonial or postcolonial culture to that of the diasporic experience. The following two articles examine the literature of exile of two writers who have crossed the globe in reverse movements, Naipaul from New World to Old to establish himself as a writer, and Choy from Old World to New, in the heart of the upwardly mobile Chinese-Canadian community. Striving to reconcile the tension between two contrasting cultures, the two works analysed operate under the sign of doubleness, fluctuating between autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiography, and the modes of nostalgia and irony – opposite but complementary approaches to distance and separation. Florence Labaune examines Naipaul’s autofiction, a generic hybrid increasingly favoured by postmodern writers, that underscores the universal plight of postcolonial artists who have had to exile themselves to gain access to the world of publishing and distribution. Florence Labaune examines the personal and cultural rifts that the uprooting causes in this mimetic text, emphasised by the mode of confession and the oscillating movement of memory, and framed by a historical continuum and a movement of peoples that culminate in a network of correspondences. The novel analysed by Christine Lorre relates the story of three generations of Chinese-Canadians, a story that spans the social history of the Chinese community in Canada since the original arrivals, imported but demonised by a society that needed their labour for the railroad construction upon which depended the building of the new nation. She argues that the fragmented narrative allows the reader to intellectualise and to physically sense the confusion and pain involved in exclusion and the slow process of integration. Never Manichaean in its portrayal of shifting roles of victim and oppressor, Choy’s narrative is a fresh view of a period of Chinese-Canadian history that has been glossed over by Chinese-Canadians, and misunderstood by mainstream Canadian culture. Christine Lorre posits that such writing is an identity-determining attempt to reclaim history, and consequently, a certain wholeness.

6Alan McLeod focusses on Cyril Dabydeen - the very embodiment of double or multiple appurtenance, for he was born and raised in Guyana of ethnic Indian parents of minority status before becoming part of the Canadian literary scene, which in the past decade has witnessed an explosion of diasporic Caribbean literature, fundamentally concerned by alienation, expatriation, and identification. McLeod argues that Dabydeen is romantically atypical in his celebratory call for inclusiveness among groups that are often still marginal and frequently antagonistic.

7All of the works studied in this volume attempt to reconcile past and present, art and experiential event, politics and poetics, questioning the process of re-presentation itself, positing that this involves (de)constructing and interpreting cultural material in an inevitably subjective and partial way. Intertext, linguistic and sociocultural interaction, plurality and hybridisation are apparently the fertile modes of the textual production emerging from these Commonwealth countries.