EDITORS’ INTRODUCTIONS

Baleful Postcoloniality and Auto/Biography
Salah D. Hassan, 1

This Introduction suggests how the essays in this Special Issue explore the continued relevance of the term postcoloniality by critically engaging with both postcolonial studies and life writing. By understanding postcoloniality as the global condition of the current baleful historic conjuncture—as the paradoxical global condition in which classes, peoples, and nations are subject to residual and often overt manifestations of imperialism and colonialism at a time when no contemporary government, state, international or supranational body, or ideology defines itself as imperialist or colonialist—past critical practices and celebratory tendencies in postcolonial studies can be corrected to recognize the dire conditions of global politics in the present.

Representing Baleful Specters and Uncanny Repetitions: Life Writing and Imperialism’s Afterlives
David Álvarez, 10

The articles in this Special Issue scrutinize life writing that provides varied evidence of balefulness—in the sense of a harm-causing force and a painful subjective condition—as a constitutive trait of the not-quite post-colonial present. Addressing themselves to a variety of sites, conjunctures, and texts from around the globe, the essays deploy, test, interrogate, and revise the term, as they analyze forms of life writing that are shaped by or that shape imperialism’s afterlives in the present. Singly and jointly, the articles shed light on the historical and contemporary structures that assail us, and on the possible contingencies that might counter them. Together, they convey the appositeness of “baleful postcoloniality” and the resistances to it as signs of and signposts to the dark yet hopeful times we inhabit.
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