This volume pays tribute to the formidable legacy of Hena Maes–Jelinek (1929–2008), a pioneering postcolonial scholar who was a professor at the University of Liège, in Belgium. Along with a few moving and affectionate pieces retracing the life and career of this remarkable and deeply human intellectual figure, the collection contains poems, short fiction, and metafiction. The bulk of the book consists of contributions on various areas of postcolonial literature, including the work of Wilson Harris, the ground-breaking writer to whom Hena Maes–Jelinek devoted much of her career. Other writers treated include Ben Okri, Leone Ross, Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Patrick White, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Dan Jacobson, Joseph Conrad, and Eslanda Goode Robeson. Caryl Phillips revisits his earlier reflections on the ‘European tribe’. There are wide-ranging essays analysing consanguineous authors, on such topics as Caribbean treatments of the Jewish Diaspora, Swiss-Caribbean authors, the contemporary Australian short story and the Asian connection, and ‘habitation’ in Australian fiction, as well as a searching examination of the socio-political fallout from the scandal of Australia’s ‘Stolen Generations’. 

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material

The Invention of Legacy: A Tribute to Hena Maes–Jelinek
Jeanne Delbaere

Because It Was She
Jeanne Delbaere

The Invention of Legacy: Opening Ceremony
Geoffrey V. Davis

Text Read at the Launch of The Labyrinth of Universality
Wilson Harris

Cumberland Lodge: Honouring Hena in the Right Setting
Alastair Niven

A Kaddish for Hena
Peter H. Marsden

The Photo
Alecia Mckenzie

The Wind Under My Lips
Stephanos Stephanides

The Empathy of Genius: Hena Maes–Jelinek and Wilson Harris
Louis James

Place and Time: The Two Anchors
T.J. Cribb

The Legacy of the Imagination: Reading Wilson Harris after Hena Maes–Jelinek
Jean–Pierre Durix

Intersections on the ‘Map of Art’: Metaphor in Ben Okri’s Dangerous Love and Wilson Harris’s The Mask of the Beggar
Daria Tunca

A Tribute to Hena
Lawrence Scott

On a Voyage to Demerara, 1859
Lawrence Scott

The Shylock In Me
Karen King–Aribisala

Revisiting The European Tribe
Caryl Phillips

How Anancy Feeds His Family (and Himself)
Fred D’aguiar

Telling Your Story: Memory and Trauma in Leone Ross’s Orange Laughter
Petra Tournay–Theodotou

On the ‘Erasure of Specificities’ in Studies of the African Diaspora
Christine Levecq

Swiss-Caribbean Authors: A Legacy of Swiss Involvement in the Colonial System
Klaus Stuckert

On the Kamau Trail: Tracking Poems from Page to Stage
Christine Pagnoulle

Race, Literacy, and Postcoloniality in Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter
Carine Mardorossian

Caribbean Writers and the Jewish Diaspora: A Shared Experience of Otherness
Bénédicte Ledent

Remarkable Developments in the Australian Short Story: John Murray and Nam Le
Peter O. Stummer

Mourning and Metafiction in Peter Carey’s Chemistry of Tears
Marc Delrez

Prologue to an Essay
Marie Herbillon

Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus: An Australian Fairy-Tale?
Marie Herbillon

Metonyms of Mood and Condition: The Semiosis of Habitation in Selected Australian Fiction Since Patrick White
Gordon Collier

(Not) Saying Sorry: Australian Responses to the Howard Government’s Refusal to Apologize to the Stolen Generations
Janet Wilson

Cannibalism and ‘Unspeakable Rites’: Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Cynthia Vanden Driesen

The Holocaust as Private and Public Crisis: Janice Kulyk Keefer’s Poetic Version of Etty Hillesum’s Diaries and Letters
Britta Olinder

“The Territory of My Imagination”: Rediscovering Dan Jacobson’s South Africa
Geoffrey V. Davis

The Legacy of Atlantic Crossings: Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey (1945)
Annalisa Oboe

Letters to the End of Grief
Dominique Hecq

Notes on Contributors and Editors

Index