Character and the Postcolonial NovelForm, Geopolitics and the Emergence of Global Anglophone Literature

The first book to address how ‘postcolonial’ novelists contest their cultural representativeness through unusual modes of literary characterisation

• Redefines the meaning of the term “postcolonial literature”
• Coins the phrase “out of character” to understand the distinctiveness of postcolonial aesthetics
• Proposes a new theory of literary character
• Discusses writing from South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean
• Brings together formalist analyses and historical material, including archival sources
  

Character and the Postcolonial Novel examines how writers respond to the geopolitical overdetermination of their work as ‘postcolonial’ with innovations in characterisation. In particular, it charts how authors from South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Caribbean deploy surprising and dissonant forms of characterisation to imaginatively contest the metropolitan (over)reading of their novels as national allegories or culturally representative texts. Through analysis of works by Mohsin Hamid, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Pankaj Mishra, Kamila Shamsie, Helon Habila, Tash Aw, Earl Lovelace and Aravind Adiga, Siddharth Srikanth demonstrates how writers redefine the referential links between character and individual, community and nation respectively, subverting the very logic that allowed their novels to circulate as ‘postcolonial’ in the first place. By treating ‘postcolonial’ novels as sites of unique formal experimentation in response to twentieth and twenty-first century geopolitics, it reveals new ways of theorising character as a literary device from the perspective of Global South authors.