This book explores questions of race and identification in writings from the Enlightenment to the present. Drawing on post-colonial theory, it provides close readings of texts by Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison and Tsitsi Dangarembga and highlights the elements of dialogue, exchange and contestation between them. It illustrates how inscriptions of racial crossing - whether between white and black or black and white - are always implicated in a certain textual and/or intertextual politics."

In recent years the work of Charlotte Bronte has undergone a significant reassessment from a postcolonial critical perspective. This book develops current scholarship by providing historically and theoretically informed readings of the full range of her texts, including new analyses of her four best known novels and other less familiar work, such as the Ashanti narratives, the poetry and the Belgian essays.
"