Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction From A Transcultural Perspective

by Christine Matzke (Editor)

Recent crime fiction increasingly transcends national boundaries, with investigators operating across countries and continents. Frequently, the detective is a migrant or comes from a transcultural background. To solve the crime, the investigator is called upon to decipher the meaning(s) hidden in clues and testimonies that require transcultural forms of understanding. For the reader, the investigation discloses new interpretive methods and processes of social investigation, often challenging facile interpretations of the postcolonial world order. Under the rubric 'postcolonial postmortems', this collection of essays seeks to explore the tropes, issues and themes that characterise this emergent form of crime fiction. But what does the 'postcolonial' bring to the genre apart from the well-known, and valid, discourses of resistance, subversion and ethnicity? And why 'postmortems'? A dissection and medical examination of a body to determine the cause of death, the 'postmortem' of the postcolonial not only alludes to the investigation of the victim's remains, but also to the body of the individual text and its contexts. This collection interrogates literary concepts of postcoloniality and crime from transcultural perspectives in the attempt to offer new critical impulses to the study of crime fiction and postcolonial literatures. International scholars offer insights into the 'postcolonial postmortems' of a wide range of texts by authors from Africa, South Asia, the Asian and African Diaspora, and Australia, including Robert G. Barrett, Unity Dow, Wessel Ebersohn, Romesh Gunesekera, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sujata Massey, Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Ondaatje. Table of Contents Acknowledgements Christine MATZKE and Susanne MÜ Postcolonial Issues and Perspectives Stephen Crimes Domestic and Crimes The Role of Crime Fiction in Developing Postcolonial Consciousness Wendy Confession, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost Tobias DÖ Sherlock Holmes – He Disenchanting the English Detective in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans Suchitra Holmes's Indian A Study in Postcolonial Transposition Katja Manga, Zen, and Negotiating Exoticism and Orientalist Images in Sujata Massey’s Rei Shimura Novels including an interview with Sujata Massey Vera Investigating the Motif of Crime as Transcultural Border Cinnamon Gardens and The Sandglass Elfi Riddles in the Sands of the Detectives at Work in Botswana Geoffrey V. Political Loyalties and the Intricacies of the Criminal The Detective Fiction of Wessel Ebersohn A.B. Christa Colonial Struggle on Manhattan George Schuyler's 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' Xavier 'Redneck Wonderland': Robert G. Barrett's Crime Fiction Patricia Transcultural British Crime Mike Phillips's Sam Dean Novels including an interview with Mike Phillips References Notes on contributors Name index Subject index

344 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2006