On the Margins: Race, Gender, and Empire focuses on the role which minority writers adopt, particularly in English. The book examines how the minority, at times, the invisible, presence is related, classified and designated within majority culture. Dathorne illustrates how the majority onlooker intended to view and perceive the other, as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Monstrous races, gruesome objects and marvelous occurrences were all located outside the sphere of the majority culture. He utilizes his global knowledge in order to investigate varied responses to culture among Africans, African-Americans and Indians. In the book, Dathorne devotes two chapters to intertextual theory in order to demonstrate how the master text a term he abjures in favor of X and Y influences and is influenced by the minority text. He shows how postcolonial theory, once it is not engaged in the process of essentializing writings, may often be of importance in articulating the voice of the them, particularly as it differs from us.

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