The Cross-Cultural Legacy: Critical and Creative Writings in Memory of Hena Maes-Jelinek

This volume pays tribute to the formidable legacy of Hena Maes-Jelinek (1929-2008), a pioneering postcolonial scholar who was a professor at the University of Liège, in Belgium. Along with a few moving and affectionate pieces retracing the life and career of this remarkable and deeply human intellectual figure, the collection contains poems, short fiction, and metafiction. The bulk of the book consists of contributions on various areas of postcolonial literature, including the work of Wilson Harris, the ground-breaking writer to whom Hena Maes-Jelinek devoted much of her career. Other writers treated include Ben Okri, Leone Ross, Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Patrick White, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Dan Jacobson, Joseph Conrad, and Eslanda Goode Robeson. Caryl Phillips revisits his earlier reflections on the ’European tribe’. There are wide-ranging essays analysing consanguineous authors, on such topics as Caribbean treatments of the Jewish Diaspora, Swiss-Caribbean authors, the contemporary Australian short story and the Asian connection, and ’habitation’ in Australian fiction, as well as a searching examination of the socio-political fallout from the scandal of Australia’s ’Stolen Generations’.

Contributors are: Gordon Collier, Tim Cribb, Fred D’Aguiar, Geoffrey V. Davis, Jeanne Delbaere, Marc Delrez, Jean-Pierre Durix, Wilson Harris, Dominique Hecq, Marie Herbillon, Louis James, Karen King-Aribisala, Bénédicte Ledent, Christine Levecq, Alecia McKenzie, Carine Mardorossian, Peter H. Marsden, Alistair Niven, Annalisa Oboe, Britta Olinder, Christine Pagnoulle, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Scott, Stephanos Stephanides, Klaus Stuckert, Peter O. Stummer, Petra Tournay-Theodotou, Daria Tunca, Cynthia vanden Driesen, Janet Wilson.

Gordon Collier and Geoffrey V. Davis, now retired, taught at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, and the Rhenish-Westphalian Technical University, respectively. Marc Delrez and Bénédicte Ledent teach at the University of Liège.