‘Shuttling between all four corners of the imperial compass, Intimate afterlives of empire brilliantly shows how memory is made up of metaphors, and how these travel and transpose between autobiographical writing from very different contexts. Astrid Rasch deftly traces influential shifts between individual and collective memory, and colonial and decolonial experience, persuasively showing how these are embedded in one another. The book ranges across a remarkable spectrum of writers, from Patrick White through to Afua Hirsch, and demonstrates how the colonial past continues to repeat upon the present, in ways we perhaps could not have fully anticipated, had we not been reading these autobiographies, and Intimate afterlives alongside them.'
Elleke Boehmer FRSL FRHistS, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford

Preface
Introduction: Reading autobiography after empire
1 Post-imperial positioning in memories of education
2 Finding home in travel narratives
3 Reclaiming legitimacy in political memoirs of independence
4 Loss and nostalgia in ex-settler family memoirs
5 Writing the past into the present in anti-racist essays
Conclusion