Twentieth-century writers have consistently sought to appropriate music's subversive ability to transcend boundaries and transform relations. In the early 1960s, Barbadian writer George Lamming argued that Caribbean musicians had begun to reverse Christopher Columbus's conquest of the Americas by invading and transforming European sensibilities: music “has made a most welcome invasion on the English spine. That spine is no different from my spine: but it needed, perhaps, to be fertilised by a change of rhythm” (1960, 77). In more recent years, authors have come to look to music as a means of escaping binary categories. Thus, Congolese author Henri Lopes, like Maryse Condé and others, radically dislodges music from questions of national identity in order to affiliate himself with a wide spectrum of music that encompasses folksong, the blues, Verdi, and Beethoven. This illustrates the shift from the oppositional and nationalist character of early postcolonial movements to the more complex, multilayered interrogation of nation and identity that characterizes the transnational moment.

The effort to rethink national identity and history is a common thread running through the works discussed in this book. Condé insists that a writer defines her own identity and creates her own language, that the imagination is as good an approach to history as any other. Similarly, Nancy Huston dwells on the capacity a writer has to “say I” from countless different perspectives. And yet, in Assia Djebar's view, the Algerian woman writer takes on a particular responsibility with respect to other Algerian women; she defines this as the imperative not to speak for other women or from their place, but rather in a relation of proximity and solidarity. Coetzee cautions that fiction offers at bestthe illusion of embracing different subject positions…