In a career spanning over forty years, Wilson Harris stands paradoxically both inside and outside “postcolonial fiction”. His almost‐surrealist style holds many similarities to postcolonial mediations on the often‐fragmented nature of postcolonial identity. Yet Harris's pursuit of slivers of spiritual truth, in an age when universals are no longer popular, places him strangely outside its discourses. Such diverse strands are explored through magical re‐appraisals of space, re‐visionings that encompass post‐modern thought, chaos theory, Western literary history and the cultures of the Caribbean and Latin America. Key to such representation is the figure of Anancy as trickster. Referring to Anancy in Jonestown (1996), Harris evokes a complex web of images ‐ carnival, mask, limbo and phantom‐limb ‐ which illustrates a development from Palace of the Peacock (1960). Harris transforms the figure of hoaxer, so that it is not a faking of the past that is envisaged, but rather a re‐making of the past.

Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have applied the principle of deconstruction to argue against the uniqueness of Western culture and its claim to be the centre of the world. Colonial discourse, with the aid of Orientalism, in attempting to assimilate into its ‘totality’ the cultures of the colonized, had made a similar claim for English culture and for Englishness. This paper argues that in The Satanic Verses the experiences of Rushdie's protagonists show that the ‘Same’ ‐ represented as Englishness ‐ is unsuccessful in absorbing its ‘Other’ into a ‘totality’ of European history, which on these grounds is therefore neither unique nor ‘sovereign’.

The title of the 4th Social Forum, “A different world is possible”, held in Bombay in January 2004 raises the question as to the choice of English language texts to be taught in New Literatures in English courses. Should not our common procedure of prioritizing texts that are “writing back” be modified by more frequently including examples that probe into or even construct possible “different worlds"?

The hoaxer is not adequately conceived in discourses on postcolonialism and globalization, despite questions of identity being central to both. Ethnic hoaxes and deceptions thrive in a world of increased migrancy in proportion to the commodification of stereotypes. The global success of the guru is in part a symptom of a persistent Orientalism (though the critique of Orientalism needs updating in a world of increased migrancy), which arguably the guru now exploits for his own benefit partly in revenge on the violence of representation. In a counter‐attack, the guru is perceived as a hoaxer in many representations made by the industries of entertainment and scepticism. The possibility that a guru might be a threat to Western rationalism or even a threatening kind of “national intellectual” (in Fanon's sense) is part of an implicit agenda in these attacks. The attacks, however, do not succeed in their goal of subversion, since they do not recognize the attraction for something that they themselves promote, which we call the ‘global imaginary’. Furthermore, sceptics in particular miss how the guru can always fall back on presenting the world as illusory in order to disarm attacks that focus on their trickery.

Helen Darville's performance as Helen Deraidenko caused a major literary scandal in Australia in 1995. Her fictional identity went beyond a pseudonym or a persona and included an ethnically categorised bodily representation. Her performance relied upon self‐categorisation processes as much as upon outgroup and ingroup stereotyping. The former shows in her short story's depiction of ethnic minority life in contemporary Australia, a depiction for which Demidenko claimed autobiographic authenticity, and which she additionally used to vindicate her controversial novel. The latter can be traced in responses towards her texts as well as her performance, across political affiliations and both by so‐called ‘genuine’ ethnics and the Australian cultural mainstream.

This essay looks at ways in which travellers tales seek to authenticate themselves by claiming to be ‘truthful’ accounts of first hand experience. Aparallel is drawn between the travel writer and the translator, since both claim to bring versions of otherness to their readers, rewritten and presented in accessible (domesticated) language and form. Yet both are highly manipulative literary activities, forms of rewriting that contain an inherent journey, and both depend on collusion between writer and reader in the creation of an illusion of authenticity. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is cited as an example of the fantastical traveller's tale.

Austin Clarke's culinary memoir Pigtails'n Breadfruit challenges the comfortable interpretive frame that genres provide. In positing ‘life writing’ as an adequate evaluative frame for this work, a term which draws on the reevaluation of autobiographical practice carried out in ethnic minority and feminist quarters, I argue that ethnographic discourse exerts great pressure on Clarke's ‘personal’ narrative. His focus constantly shifts away from himself into his community and wider cultural and historical issues. This paper is also concerned with the identity and language politics of the text.

Forgery is a specialised form of story‐telling, highly rule‐bound and intricately concerned with issues of identity. So is the English legal system. In the nature of things, the two often run into one another. This paper is a narrative of such an encounter, a story of stories, and the field of identity around which these stories conflicted was that of George Glen Lewis, a black man living in the West Midlands who in 1987 accused the police of forgery.