ABSTRACT
It is no surprise that Bart Moore-Gilbert was part of the project that has generated this special issue of Life Writing on ‘After Empire’, and this Afterword draws together his criticism on postcolonial theory and his own life writing in memoir and social media to sustain his presence here. The problem of where to begin mapping postcolonial life narrative and what coordinates are fit for the purpose preoccupied both of us, as authors of two books that survey the field, and we last discussed this when I visited Bart at Goldsmiths to draw (again) on his encouragement and advice a few years ago. We talked about the uncertain beginnings of postcolonial life narrative in the refectory at Goldsmiths campus in East London, and later in standing-room only space of a crowded train back into the city, when Bart began to talk about a new project: his quest to understand his father’s role as an officer in the India Police Service at the end of the Raj, on the eve of Indian Independence in 1947. The postcolonial critic was turning to memoir, and pursuing a haunting question raised in an email from an Indian historian: what did your father do in service of empire?
