This article argues that development economics, pioneered in the 1950s and early 1960s, provides a productive analytical framework for postcolonial scholars interested in understanding literary narratives of development in the moment of decolonisation. The article focuses on the work of Saint Lucian economist and Nobel Prize winner W. Arthur Lewis and former Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to explore the period's optimistic belief in the benefits of economic development. Despite their different backgrounds and public roles, both Lewis and Nehru agreed that newly independent nations could achieve significant economic growth and alleviate chronic poverty and inequality through rapid industrialisation and agricultural modernisation. Their writings offer postcolonial scholars a richly detailed picture of post-war economic thought and enable a historicised analysis of fictional narratives of development. This article undertakes such an analysis by examining three Indian novels: Nayantara Sahgal's This Time ofMorning (1965) and Storm In Chandigarh (1969) and Bhabani Bhattacharya's Shadow from Ladakh (1967). These novels interrogate the impact of Nehru's economic policies on people's daily lives, as well as the period's intense interest in development economics more generally.
The persistence of religion's public presence and the surging instances of majoritarian violence have impelled scholars of South Asia to approach the question of religion anew. In the study of Anglophone literature this renewed interest is reflected in the attempts to salvage an idea of plurality by contrasting or-thodoxy to more fluid forms of religious co-existence. This article argues that the attempts to explain majority-minority tension through recourse to notions such as orthodoxy-heterodoxy are underwritten by a secular logic, resulting in the ossification of re-ligion as a cultural artifact and oversight of how religion comes to be lived, inhabited, and embodied within conditions of moder-nity. Reading the various registers of language animated by Anees Salim's novel Vanity Bagh (2013), the article explores how the Anglophone novel makes the inhabitation of religion thinkable, less as adherence to cosmopolitan virtues than as attunement to an embodied tradition, thereby suggesting the need to rethink the secular grammar undergirding much contemporary Anglophone scholarship.
This article reads Meena Kandasamy's The Gypsy Goddess (2014), an exploration of one of modern India's most horrific cases of anti-Dalit violence, to trace how Dalit literature uses imaginative and speculative modalities to disrupt dominant historical frameworks. Historical erasures and excisions have made Dalit life-worlds and experiences inaccessible to the methodologies of positivist history writing. In response, Dalit writers construct and assert their history through different means. Kandasamy's novel negotiates archival limits and braids together folk memory, oral narratives, and literary imagination to recover the history of the Kilvenmani massacre. Placing this event at the nexus of national and global chronologies, Kandasamy suggests that, despite its cultural specificity, Dalit experience resonates with other globally marginalised groups. This article reads The Gypsy Goddess through a transnational lens, including through Saidiya Hartman's practice of critical fabulation, and argues that the novel's alternate historical framework supports global networks of humanitarian solidarity.
Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons ofMaali Almeida (2022) unfolds during a civil war and focuses on Maali Almeida, a renegade war photographer who must solve a murder mystery after his death. It presents a Kafkaesque afterlife that blends magical realism with a whodunit thriller to examine politics, existence, war trauma, and memory. This interview explores how the novel addresses memory and collective historical experiences.
This article presents an interview with an emerging postcolonial author, Shona Patel, about her debut novel, Teatime for the Firefly, to understand her distinct perspective on the remote tea plantations of Assam. The interview addresses Patel's writing strategies for historical fiction, the imperial plantation history of India, and the sources of her novel. Through Patel's discourses on tea, this article demonstrates how the rhetoric of "tea time"-often linked with imperial aesthetics and leisure-has been challenged, redefined, or recontextualised in contemporary postcolonial narratives, highlighting ideological shifts in representing the plantation economy. This article enhances our understanding of how diasporic literature contributes to decolonising narratives of South Asian plantation history.
Claude McKay's 1928 novel Home to Harlem depicts a Black man, Jake Brown, who deserts the Great War after serv- ing in labor battalions but never in combat. The story follows the tradition of the nostos, a tale of homecoming, usually from war, in the vein of Homer's Odyssey. . McKay's novel joins Joyce's Ulysses , Pound's Cantos, , both of which find in Odysseus a figure who speaks to the modern age. Pound's concept of the periplum is par- ticularly useful in articulating Jake's dilemma once he returns to Harlem. As an eye-level description of a landscape that Odysseus experiences on his sea travels and that is recorded in the Cantos, , the periplum expresses both the joy and the perils of immediate sensory experience. Jake tries to rise above the various eye-level temptations that keep him from finding his true Penelope, the nightclub singer Felice, whose address he loses on his second day home. In his struggle to find her, Jake must first acquire a tran- scendent cartographic perspective, which helps him not only to withstand Harlem's many disorienting enticements but also to understand his own place as a disenfranchised Black man on the national and world map.
Analyzing Samuel R. Delany's "We, in Some Power's Strange Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" (1968) and Nnedi Okorafor's "Spider the Artist" (2011), this article argues that both science fiction stories respond to forms of energy extraction and their effects on both the environment and the people who live with and in it, as well as the sociocultural forms extraction generates. Engaging Afrofuturist discourse, in Delany's case, and africanfuturist approaches, in Okorafor's, the stories likewise also use different lyric forms to disrupt the narratives of the dominant energy regimes presented, offering instead new modes of social and cultural being beyond the linear stories of extraction.
Several canonical works of twentieth-century literature have dramatized the tension in the host/guest relationship and the question of duty in colonial and postcolonial settings: Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation" (1931) and Albert Camus' "The Guest" (1958) explore these tensions in Ireland under British rule (O'Connor) and in Algeria under French rule (Camus), while E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) and Salman Rushdie's Midnights' Children (1981) provide two of the most extensive and complex treatments of the relationship between hospitality and hostility in the context of the British Raj and its aftermath, with the later novel existing in a relationship of both hospitality and hostility to the earlier one. Considering these four works together might help us, in the words of Alberto Fern & aacute;ndez Carbajal, "to understand more fully how an ongoing negotiation of friendship against public enmity can find a discursive and ideological bridge between colonial and postcolonial writing" (124). What the O'Connor and Camus stories share with the Forster and Rushdie novels is a powerful indictment of how traditional ideas of duty and responsibility for one's fellows are disrupted by colonialism and its aftereffects.
This article draws on affect studies and the theory of solidarity to examine the emergence of a grassroots revolution in NoViolet Bulawayo's Glory (2022). While the novel engages with existing scholarship on the affective politics of solidarity, it also adds a critical dimension to these discussions by exploring the nuanced role of various emotions in fostering coalition-building for resistance in a fictionalised post-2017 Zimbabwe. Contrary to Sally Scholtz's assertion about the primacy of hope in political solidarity, Glory suggests that hope alone is insufficient to unify and mobilise the novel's characters. They remain paralysed by their fear of the authorities despite their simultaneous frustration and anger about their sociopolitical circumstances. In this sense, the narrative also challenges the traditional dichotomy of hope and fear as opposing forces, particularly through its depiction of the emotional state Katie Stockdale calls "fearful hope" (25). The novel illustrates how intense feelings of injustice, specifically protagonist Destiny's bitterness, can mobilise a profoundly divided populace into collective defiance, despite the reputation of this emotion for being destructive. The movement towards rebellion, which also encompasses grief and remembrance, forges solidarity across deep social and ethnic divides, thus evoking the traditional Black feminist approach to coalition politics. Ultimately, Glory advances radical love as an essential component of this intersectional solidarity and emphasises love's transformative potential as both a means of embracing difference in the pursuit of liberation and a framework for imagining more just futures. By portraying this emotional evolution, the novel deepens our understanding of the affective and ethical foundations necessary for solidarity and provides innovative insights into the intricate relationships between fear and hope, anger and revolution, and love and solidarity in contemporary postcolonial contexts of oppression.
Scholars have analyzed Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl (2002) for its critique of the United States military as an imperialist force complicit in sexually exploiting Korean women and children. However, past studies have not thoroughly explored the function of food in the novel. The novel's emphasis on food is neither incidental nor merely a product of the author's imagination but grounded in Korea's history of scarcity and the critical role food has played in sustaining imperial power. I argue that Fox Girl exposes American food products as a key imperial infrastructure. The novel captures the ways the US military utilizes American food products to project and uphold an image of American benevolence in Korea, though Keller subverts this infrastructure by using food imagery to produce what I call a resistant culinary aesthetic. First, by entwining American food items with scenes of venereal disease, chemical poisoning, and sexual assault, she turns them into unsettling metaphors that expose the US military's violence against Korean sex workers. Second, she scales back food imagery to mirror the protagonist's deepening disillusionment with the US. Finally, she mobilizes food imagery to underscore the historical continuity of abuse against Korean women and to mark the transpacific reach of the US empire.
This article argues that Shehan Karunatilaka's 2022 novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida articulates a "postmemorial" supplement to Sri Lanka's Era of Terror of the 1980s. By deploying the gaze of a dead queer photographer who seeks to constitute a non-existent archive of violence using a broken camera, the novel presents an alternative historiography that subverts the grand patriarchal narrative of the state's supposedly righteous administration. By adapting, extending, and localizing Marianne Hirsch's framework of "postmemory," the article illustrates how Karunatilaka's novel uses limited photographic and historical material as "testimonial objects" (Hirsch 178) to forge a transgenerational connection between present-day Sri Lankans and the victims, witnesses, and survivors of the Era of Terror. The article also argues that Karunatilaka uses Buddhism in two ways: to invoke an Indigenous cultural register with which to stage the unprocessed trauma of political violence and to satirize the state's agenda. In this fashion, the novel calls for a transgenerational "addressable other"-in line with Dori Laub's framing-for the historical trauma of the 1980s. Karunatilaka insists that the present-day generation should reckon with the Era of Terror to better engage with the crises of memory, justice, and accountability that Sri Lanka faces today.
This article examines how people implicated in imperial histories may approach how they think about themselves and their relationship to power in order to support reparations for the transatlantic enslavement and trade of Africans. It analyses Michael Rothberg's political theory of the implicated subject in relation to Hazel V. Carby's historical biography Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (2019) to illuminate how these two works help us think about the reparatory justice movement. Carby's discussion enables a more complex understanding of identity, reason, and power than how they are implied in the theory of the implicated subject. First, the theory of implication seems to dismiss the concept of identity yet leaves untouched problematic presuppositions about it. Second, rather than assuming a self-reflective understanding of complicity, social justice, and solidarity, the theory of implication needs to confront questions of open, public, and transcultural reasoning and debate. Third, the theory of the implicated subject negatively considers power as exercised in social situations, which subverts the possibility of the alliances that are necessary for successful social justice movements. Because implication is an inevitable condition of globalized modernity and beyond, it serves us well to consider both its negative and positive aspects, something Carby's biography helps us to do.
This article offers a reading of Michelle Good's novel Five Little Indians (2020) with an emphasis on its representation of what I term "creative groundedness," or the capacity to generate a sense of collective and personal balance through communal and land-based forms of creativity. It draws on contemporary Indigenous scholarship by Glen Coulthard, Daniel Heath Justice, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, among others, to examine the characters' reinvention of their broken lives through solidarity, respect, and mutual support. The analysis also builds on the work of feminist scholars of affect Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant to explore how Good's message is often predicated on the creative power of the affective. Ultimately, I argue that the novel moves beyond proposing strategies of resilience and survival and promotes the value of situated, relational, reciprocal, and community-based practices to heal Indigenous lives on urban and rural land.
Abstract: This article examines how people implicated in imperial histories may approach how they think about themselves and their relationship to power in order to support reparations for the transatlantic enslavement and trade of Africans. It analyses Michael Rothberg's political theory of the implicated subject in relation to Hazel V. Carby's historical biography Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (2019) to illuminate how these two works help us think about the reparatory justice movement. Carby's discussion enables a more complex understanding of identity, reason, and power than how they are implied in the theory of the implicated subject. First, the theory of implication seems to dismiss the concept of identity yet leaves untouched problematic presuppositions about it. Second, rather than assuming a self-reflective understanding of complicity, social justice, and solidarity, the theory of implication needs to confront questions of open, public, and transcultural reasoning and debate. Third, the theory of the implicated subject negatively considers power as exercised in social situations, which subverts the possibility of the alliances that are necessary for successful social justice movements. Because implication is an inevitable condition of globalized modernity and beyond, it serves us well to consider both its negative and positive aspects, something Carby's biography helps us to do.
This article demonstrates the indissociable role of empathy in sustaining the systemic violence of extractivism, a term describing the global drive to exhaustively extract resources. The article contends that empathy, as depicted in Marian Engel's Bear (1976), not only fails to serve as a corrective for settler colonial guilt but also reinforces extractivist logic. Although Engel has not been widely recognized as one of the Canadian authors addressing colonial dispossession and ecological depletion, her novel offers a witty exploration of the Canadian natural world and Indigeneity through the way that Lou, the protagonist of the novel, practices empathy. After Lou attempts to form a romantic relationship with the eponymous bear, the animal strikes her on her back, leaving a painful wound that is often interpreted as a symbol of her repentance and personal growth. However, its significance in the context of racialized empathy becomes more pronounced when compared to the strikingly similar slashed upper torso of an Indigenous woman in Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore's photograph Fringe (2007). Engel's novel suggests that while empathy toward Indigenous people and animals can catalyze ethical action, it can also re-enact an extractivist ideology. In Lou's case, empathy causes her both to appropriate Indigeneity while exploiting access to resources unavailable to Indigenous people and to instrumentalize her own sexuality.
Readings of Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1988) often interpret it as simply about an Anglophilic Indian middle class. This essay focuses on how poverty and communal violence provide the context for most bourgeois narratives from South Asia. The only image of a slum in the novel appears when the child-narrator is on a veranda he is not supposed to be on. The slum is built in one of the effluent-filled marshes on the outskirts of Calcutta. Seeing a woman use her hands to push back toxic sludge to use the water underneath is unusual but not shocking for the narrator. I argue that the disruptive image of the precarious shantytown demonstrates how a self-defeating preoccupation with looking away from the quotidian horrors of life in India forms the very basis of Indian middle-class life.
This essay explores the viability of developing non- dualistic identities in a globalized world that imposes neo- imperialistic hierarchies like old/new, east/west, oppressed/oppressor, and terrorist/terrorized. Incorporating theories of the contact zone, translocality, and contemporary coloniality, I analyze how Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) blurs the division between past and present and shows how seemingly distant spaces like Pakistan, the United States, and Chile are all connected. Although it has often been interpreted as a post-9/11 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist challenges linear spatiotemporal structures that lend themselves to neat conclusions. This article approaches Chile as a turning point, where the nation-bound mindset foregrounded in the beginning of the novel gives way to an alternative way of thinking about interconnectedness. Yet this paradigm shift is narrated through a monologic form that makes it impossible to determine if the novel endorses the idea of a stable identity or prefers one that changes constantly. By not resolving this interpretive dilemma, The Reluctant Fundamentalist envisions a liminal political self that challenges neo-imperialism by oscillating between then and now, here and there.
