The English-speaking world today is so diverse that readers need a gateway to its many postcolonial narratives and art forms. This collection of essays examines this diversity and what brings so many different cultures together. Whether Indian, Canadian, Australasian or Zimbabwean, the stories discussed focus on how artists render experiences of separation, belonging, and loss. The histories and transformations postcolonial countries have gone through have given rise to a wide range of myths that retrace their birth, evolution, and decline. Myths have enabled ethnic communities to live together; the first section of this collection dwells on stories, which can be both inclusive and exclusive, under the aegis of 'nation'. While certain essays revisit and retell the crucial role women have played in mythical texts like the Mahabharata, others discuss how settler colonies return to and re-appropriate a past in order to define themselves in the present. Crises, clashes, and conflicts, which are at the heart of the second section of this book, entail myths of historical and cultural dislocation. They appear as breaks in time that call for reconstruction and redefinition, a chief instance being the trauma of slavery, with its deep geographical and cultural dislocations. However, the crises that have deprived entire communities of their homeland and their identity are followed by moments of remembrance, reconciliation, and rebuilding. As the term 'postcolonial' suggests, the formerly colonized people seek to revisit and re-investigate the impact of colonization before committing it to collective memory. In a more specifically literary section, texts are read as mythopoeia, foregrounding the aesthetic and poetic issues in colonial and postcolonial poems and novels. The texts explored here study in different ways the process of mythologization through images of location and dislocation. The editors of this collection hope that readers worldwide will enjoy reading about the myths that have shaped and continue to shape postcolonial communities and nations. CONTRIBUTORS Elara Bertho, Dunlaith Bird, Marie-Christine Blin, Jaine Chemmachery, Andre Dodeman, Biljana Doric Francuski, Frederic Dumas, Daniel Karlin, Sabine Lauret-Taft, Anne Le Guellec-Minel, Elodie Raimbault, Winfried Siemerling, Laura Singeot, Francoise Storey, Jeff Storey, Christine Vandamme

This book is a collection of essays from the conference "Re/membering Place", held at Stendhal University from 13 to 15 October 2011. It explores the issue of "Re/membering Place" in a colonial and postcolonial context of displacement, loss, and alienation. The authors consider "re/membering" as a process of reconstruction which entails the recreation of memory, be it individual or collective, the re-appropriation of the past and of collective myths, the reshaping of identity, and their representation in literature and the arts. They tackle various forms of story-telling in fiction, autobiography, the travel narrative, the memoir, historiography as well as cinema. Further, they analyse how memory and personal testimonies serve to fill in the blanks of historical discourse, to give voice to a forgotten community, revisit historiography and question the canon of Western culture. Through the exploration of richly diverse geographies and cultures throughout the world, from the Indian subcontinent to the Atlantic landscapes of Canada and the Caribbean, and the open spaces of Africa and Australia, this collection of essays introduces the reader to the crucial identity issues and problems raised in narratives today.