Writing back, writing forth. Confini delle riscritture postcoloniali

The aim of this essay is to show how postcolonial rewritings overcame the phase of “writing back to the canon” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin) and creating new “con-texts” (Thieme) to become global intertextual works referring to multiple intertwined hypotexts. To do so, after a theoretical first part on rewriting and the Postcolonial, I examine three masterpieces of postcolonial rewriting: a typical example of “writing back” with political implications, Une tempête by Aimé Césaire; a novel showing the impossibility of “writing back with a vengeance” by a white author in the South African apartheid context, Foe by J. M. Coetzee; and another novel that, on the contrary, is a turning point in the creation of a new sort of decolonized rewriting, Jack Maggs by the Australian Peter Carey. Lastly, a reference to Quichotte, the latest narrative work by Salman Rushdie, will show the opening of the frontiers of rewriting towards a World Literature where labels like “postcolonial” no longer have a meaning.