Monumentalism and Monuments in Postcolonial Literatures: Dismembering Tradition

Abstract

This article explores how postcolonial literatures engage in critical negotiations of monumentalism and, more specifically, contest the generic conventions of the epic, which is often considered the monumental genre par excellence. Postcolonial uses of the epic examine and challenge the ideological premises of monumental forms of remembrance, while they also exploit the epic’s symbolic value for their own political and poetic agenda. The interpretations of Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) and Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune (1998) reveal that monumentalism in postcolonial literatures is punctuated by selfreflexive, ironic and non-essentialist forms, which bear witness to both the persistence and the mutability of cultural traditions. The self-reflexive monumentalism of these postcolonial writings is not only a key aesthetic strategy employed to foreground cultural difference and localize meaning but also establishes transcultural connections between seemingly diverse cultures. It is by means of the complexity of the form that the texts evoke the multivocal network of entangled histories.