Life Writing and the End of Empire

Life Writing and the End of Empire: Homecoming in Autobiographical Narratives (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) examines how autobiographical writing reflects the psychological and cultural afterlives of the British Empire. Rather than treating decolonization as a completed historical moment, Emma Parker shows how empire continues to haunt personal memory, identity, and ideas of home. Through close readings of memoirs and autobiographical texts by writers such as Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, and Janet Frame, the book explores how individuals who grew up in colonial settings experienced their later arrival in Britain as a complex and often disorienting “homecoming.” Many of those writers traveled to Britain in the decades following WWII, during a period of rapid decolonization. Yet when they arrived in London, they often discovered that the imperial “mother country” they had imagined from afar did not match the reality of postwar Britain. Their autobiographies reveal a profound sense of displacement, being both connected to and estranged from the imperial center.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Emma Parker to discuss the relationship between life writing and the end of the British Empire; the disorienting experience of colonial “homecoming;” and what autobiography can reveal about empire that other literary forms may conceal. They also explore colonial childhood and domestic space in the writings of Lively, Ballard, Lessing, and Frame, examining settler identity, displacement, memory, and the material afterlives of colonialism.

Emma Parker is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at Keele University, UK. Her research focusses on life writing, contemporary literature and colonialism. She has published articles in Critical Quarterly, Auto/Biography Studies, Life Writing, Wasafiri and Moving Worlds, and is a contributor to Documenting Trauma in Comics (2020). She is also co-editor of the collection British Culture After Empire (2022).

Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026). His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.