The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought

The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South background from both before 1967 and Barthes’s declaration and in its wake. This book provides a focused account of the early history of the way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and occasionally adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of that most fetishised and also reviled of figures: the author. Michael Griffiths is Senior Lecturer in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the author of The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture (2018) and his essays have appeared in Textual Practice, Settler Colonial Studies, Discourse, Postcolonial Studies, Australian Humanities Review and many edited books including the Cambridge History of the Australian Novel and the Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel. Griffiths edited the book Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture (2016). He also coedited a special issue with Bruno Cornellier of Settler Colonial Studies in 2015 titled: “Globalising Unsettlement” and, with Tanja Dreher, a special issue of Continuum which offered an account of freedom of speech debates in the late liberal world and was reprinted as a book in 2021.