Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780299226107)

Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. Autobiography and Decolonization is the first book to give serious academic attention to autobiographies of nationalist leaders in the process of decolonization, attending to them not simply as partial historical documents, but as texts involved in remaking the world views of their readers. Holden examines Mohandas K. Gandhi's An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Marcus Garvey's fragmentary Autobiography, Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound, Lee Kuan Yew's The Singapore Story, Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru's An Autobiography, and Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. Holden argues that these examples of life writing have had significant influence on the formation of new, and often profoundly gendered, national identities. These narratives constitute the nation less as an imagined community than as an imagined individual. Moving from the past to the promise of the future, they mediate relationships between public and private, and between individual and collective stories. Ultimately, they show how the construction of modern selfhood is inextricably linked to the construction of a postcolonial polity.

Author: Philip Holden
ISBN-10: 0299226107
ISBN-13: 9780299226107
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Language: English
Published: 05/01/2008
Pages: 296
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.12lbs
Size: 9.27h x 6.06w x 0.92d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 07/04/2008 pg. 18