“An inventory of the traces”: Reading anticolonial theory and writing decolonising life narratives

Throughout my teaching on postcolonial theory, I have found life narratives key to revealing diverse worlds and epistemologies. In my classroom, I teach narratives through which we encounter experiential modes of witnessing that are critical to anticolonial politics. For instance, the theoretical work of Frantz Fanon or Edward W. Said, both of whom leveraged their experiences as professional observers of lives (as a psychiatrist, as a literary critic), to write thoughtfully of their own experiences working within racial and colonial structures. Said’s study of Orientalism was “an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals” (1999, p. 25). For Said, Orientalism is not some abstract theory, but rather, a reality of being constituted a particular way. In my pedagogical practice, I invite my students to write short journals to reflect on postcolonial authors like Said, Fanon, Jamaica Kincaid, Chinua Achebe, and others in relation to their own experiences. Through such activities, reflecting upon their discontinuities in relation to entrenched norms, students facilitate critical perspectives. This paper explores the contribution of life narrative to theory, theory to life writing, and insights into what, to paraphrase Said, we might call an inventory of the “traces” on bodies and lives.