Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction engages urgently with wealth, testing current assumptions of inequality in order to push beyond reductive contemporary readings of the gaping abyss between rich and poor. Shifting away from longstanding debates in postcolonial criticism focused on poverty and abjection, the book marshals fresh perspectives on material, spiritual, and cultural prosperity as found in the literatures of formerly colonized spaces. The chapters ‘follow the money’ to illuminate postcolonial fiction’s awareness of the ambiguities of ‘wealth’, acquired under...

Though obvious, the productiveness of combining the three concepts of childhood, otherness and the postcolonial has not inspired much academic inquiry so far. The essays assembled in this book make up for this omission and address aspects of growing up in Australia and New Zealand from various angles. They base their argument on the premise that, whether in settler, migrant or indigenous communities, children tend to be ascribed a space of their own, mostly outside but never independent of that of adults. How adults configure this space both practically and imaginatively, for instance in the...