Introduction

It has been suggested that it is ‘deeply unfashionable’ (Whitlock 2000: 41) to engage with the notion of the settler subject and that little has been done to theorise this aspect of colonial and postcolonial identity. Indeed, Gillian Whitlock goes further in suggesting that there is ‘active hostility’ to the ‘inclusion of Australian, Canadian, South African and New Zealand colonial settlements in the framework of the postcolonial’ (Whitlock 2000: 41). Yet, it seems to me to be a crucial project of post-colonial theory to examine the ways in which such ‘unsettled settlers’ (in J. M. Coetzee’s memorable phrase) inscribe, through their literary practices, their shifting and ambivalent identities and subjectivities, illuminating as it does the complex nature of resistance, complicity and representation.