Character and the Postcolonial Novel (Form, Geopolitics and the Emergence of Global Anglophone Literature)

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.