The postimperial imagination: The emergence of a transnational literary space, from Samuel Beckett to Hanif Kureishi

In literary and cultural studies, the demise of the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century has commonly been regarded as an event that succeeded in terminating the longstanding relationship between Britain and its colonies. Not only does this notion risk overstating the consequences of the end of empire, within literary studies it has perpetuated the binary logic of formal imperialism while also failing to account for the transnational space within which many postcolonial and British novels, plays, and films have been conceived and read, performed and viewed. In order to more accurately capture the transnational character of Anglophone postcolonial and postwar British literature, this dissertation advocates a criticism that takes as its subject the postempire. In spatial terms, the postempire is meant to indicate all of the diverse peoples and territories that made up the British Empire at its apex, including Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England; in a temporal sense, the postempire is intended to highlight the responses that the apparent mid-twentieth-century end of empire produced. The bulk of this study addresses innovations within the field of cultural production in relation to novels and performance texts by Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Alasdair Gray, Hanif Kureishi, and Meera Syal. The first two chapters trace the trajectories, the movement outward and the movement inward, that shaped the contours of the postempire; while the last two chapters consider the institutions within which postimperial life has most often been represented: the nation and the family. The Postimperial Imagination argues that the cultural turn that coincided with the advent of the postempire was a response to an increasing frustration with the political field on the part of writers and other artists as well as the new challenges of informal imperialism.