Mock 5 – Postcolonial & Commonwealth Literature

Thematic criticism of the 1970s, after Frye's 'garrison mentality': Jones (1970), Atwood (1972), Moss (1974), Ricou (1973).

Aimé Césaire coined 'négritude' in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939); with Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas he made it a movement affirming Black African identity.

Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (1971) → Ondaatje, The English Patient (1992) → Mistry, Family Matters (2002) → Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge (2003) → Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood (2023).

Kim Scott (Noongar; Benang, That Deadman Dance), Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker, We Are Going, 1964) and Kevin Gilbert (Wiradjuri poet and activist) are Aboriginal. Peter Carey is a white Australian novelist and Derek Walcott is from St Lucia.

Patrick White: A Life (1991) is David Marr's biography of White. Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, Gandhi's autobiography and Sharankumar Limbale's Akkarmashi are autobiographies.

Gordimer's July's People (1981) and My Son's Story (1990) and Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) are set in South Africa under racial segregation. Adichie's Purple Hibiscus is set in Nigeria and Naipaul's The Mimic Men on a Caribbean island.

UN year 1993; Kevin Rudd's apology, 13 February 2008; the Whitlam government ended the policy in 1973; first Sorry Day, 26 May 1998.

Oodgeroo (Kath Walker; We Are Going, 1964), Jack Davis (No Sugar) and Kevin Gilbert (Because a White Man'll Never Do It) are Aboriginal writer-activists.

Margaret Atwood, Frye's student at Victoria College, Toronto, paid this tribute to him (Globe and Mail, 1991).

Coleman (Noongar), Morgan (Palyku) and Pilkington (Mardu) are Aboriginal writers. Hurston's novel (1937) and Crafts's narrative are African American.

Note: The source names the author of The Bondwoman's Narrative as 'Hannah Bond'; she is known as Hannah Crafts.

Pilkington tells of her mother Molly's 1931 escape from Moore River; Gordimer's novel (1990) follows Sonny, a coloured teacher turned activist, and his family.

The Stone Angel (1964) is Margaret Laurence's first Manawaka novel. The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972) and The Handmaid's Tale (1985) are Atwood's.

Achebe was Nigerian. 'On the Abolition of the English Department' (1968) is by Ngũgĩ with Owuor Anyumba and Taban Lo Liyong.

The Vivisector (1970), about the painter Hurtle Duffield, is by White, Australia's Nobel laureate (1973).

Roth is American and Graham Swift (Waterland, Last Orders) is English.

The poem (1964) mourns the lost bora ring, corroboree and hunting life: 'We are going.'

The poem (1979) maps the Bible — Genesis, Exodus, the Ark, Lamentations — onto the Middle Passage and Caribbean history, answering the claim that the islands have no history.

Fred D'Aguiar is British-Guyanese, and Zulfikar Ghose was born in Sialkot (now Pakistan).

Pierre Trudeau announced the multiculturalism policy in 1971; the Canadian Multiculturalism Act became law in 1988.

In Writers in Politics (1981) Ngũgĩ attacks a Eurocentric syllabus that alienates Kenyan children from their history. He wants African and Third World literature at the centre.

The trilogy Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968) and Islands (1969) was collected as The Arrivants (1973).

Achebe's satire on vote-buying (Girls at War, 1972): Rufus 'Roof' Okeke campaigns for Chief Marcus Ibe.

Soyinka (1970); Walcott (1954); Ngũgĩ and Micere Mugo (1976); the Jamaican Dennis Scott (1974).

Title story of Gordimer's 2007 collection.