Postcolonial Ageing in Literature and Film

Focusing on a range of texts – including fiction, film, and television documentary – from Indigenous Aotearoa New Zealand and the Caribbean diaspora, this is the first critical study establishing the subfield of postcolonial ageing studies.

Focusing on a range of twentieth and twenty-first century texts – including fiction, film, and television documentary – from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Caribbean diaspora, this groundbreaking study establishes the subfield of postcolonial ageing studies.

The first study of its kind to offer a sustained engagement with representations of old age across contemporary postcolonial and Indigenous literary and cinematographic texts, this book frames postcolonial ageing studies as necessary for understanding age and ageing in a world living with the consequences of colonisation. In doing so, Timms foregrounds how postcolonial writers and directors imagine ageing otherwise to empire’s legacies by offering creative and critical interventions to ever-growing cultural and social concerns on elderhood, care, and dementia.
Through interdisciplinary readings of canonical writers and directors such as Patricia Grace, Beryl Gilroy, Witi Ihimaera, Shani Mootoo and Barry Barclay as well as lesser-surveyed figures such as Merle Collins, James Napier Robinson and Pauline Melville, this book diversifies the canon typically examined in age studies and establishes postcolonial ageing studies as a vital field of enquiry for both ageing studies and postcolonial criticism.