Intimate Afterlives of Empire

'Shuttling between all four corners of the imperial compass, Intimate afterlives of empire brilliantly shows how memory is made up of metaphors, and how these travel and transpose between autobiographical writing from very different contexts. Astrid Rasch deftly traces influential shifts between individual and collective memory, and colonial and decolonial experience, persuasively showing how these are embedded in one another.'
Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford
Intimate afterlives of empire is the first comprehensive study of post-imperial autobiography as an important genre of cultural memory. It investigates the relationship between individual and cultural memory at the end of empire as voiced through the practice of autobiographical writing. While the narrative changes brought about by decolonisation have previously been studied at the level of collective or national memory, Intimate afterlives of empire is the first book to examine how individuals have responded to this changing narrative landscape. It argues that authors are at once affected by and seek to affect cultural memories of the colonial past.
Through close readings of over a dozen autobiographies and memoirs written after the break-up of the British Empire, the volume examines the forms of this memory work, demonstrating how authors position themselves and make claims to belong. It maps the key tropes, sub-genres and concerns of post-imperial autobiography from decolonisation until the present from Australia, Zimbabwe, the Caribbean and Britain. Through fine-grained analyses that never lose sight of the bigger picture, Rasch examines narrative shifts in the wake of decolonisation but also empire's lingering presence in the shape of nostalgia and racism. Theoretically informed yet accessible, the book offers an essential guide to the genre of the end of empire autobiography.