ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two texts which both problematize the relation between archive and literary voice: Amitav Ghosh's travelogue "In an Antique Land" and Yvette Christianse's novel "Unconfessed". Both texts deal with the complex structures of freedom and dependence born out of the long history of trade across the Indian Ocean and both articulate their critique of colonial epistemologies. Literary texts approaching archival material often also end up reflecting on what Andrew van der Vlies terms the ethics of narrative in the context of the legacies of colonial discursive formations. Both Unconfessed and In an Antique Land are crucially concerned with tracing the literary both as an expression of an enabling sympathetic imagination and as embedded within oppressive discursive structures. In an Antique Land describes the ethnographic research the present-day protagonist carries out in two Egyptian villages. Chambers shows how Ghosh's text can be read as an experimental ethnography in the framework of movement of the New Anthropologists.
