Book Cover -- Title -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- Notes on contributors -- Acknowledgements -- INTRODUCTION The textuality of Empire -- THE SCRAMBLE FOR POST-COLONIALISM -- EXCESS Post-colonialism and the verandahs of meaning -- SOME PROBLEMS OF RESPONSE TO EMPIRE IN SETTLER POST-COLONIAL SOCIETIES -- THEORIZING RACISM -- THE MYTH OF AUTHENTICITY Representation, discourse and social practice -- BREYTEN BREYTENBACH AND THE CENSOR -- DE-SCRIBING ORALITY Performance and the recuperation of voice -- INSCRIBING THE EMPTINESS Cartography, exploration and the construction of Australia -- THE UNFINISHED COMMONWEALTH Boundaries of civility in popular Australian fiction of the first Commonwealth decade -- 'THE SOFTEST DISORDER' Representing cultural indeterminacy -- 'THE ONLY FREE PEOPLE IN THE EMPIRE' Gender difference in colonial discourse -- DE-SCRIBING THE WATER-BABIES 'The child' in post-colonial theory -- MODERNITY, VOICE, AND WINDOW-BREAKING Jean Rhys's 'Let them call it jazz' -- SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE London, Cambridge and the Caribbean -- THE SPEAKING ABJECT The impossible possible world of realized Empire -- CONCLUSION Reading difference -- Bibliography -- Index.