Representations of nation and class in postcolonial fiction

This dissertation examines the relationship between nation and class in a range of postcolonial fiction. The field of postcolonial studies, I suggest, is marked by an anti-nationalist trend that betrays an idealist and ahistorical approach to both politics and literature. In chapter 1, I revisit the debate on “national allegory” between Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad, and argue for the validity of Jameson's claim that “a certain nationalism” remains fundamental in the postcolonial world. I then examine novels by the Indonesian writers Mochtar Lubis and Pramoedya Ananta Toer, to show that there is no necessary correlation between Right and Left, on the one hand, and nationalism and anti-nationalism on the other. The significance of nationalism in the postcolonial novel can only be properly understood through a historical materialist approach, which pays close attention to the specificity of the text and accounts for the historical—structural and conjunctural—contexts of the novel's publication. In chapter 2, I examine the relationship between history, memory and the nation in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines and A. Sivanandan's When Mempa Dies. Where Ghosh's novel re-enacts a liberal, ahistorical critique of the nation, Sivanandan's novel, I argue, successfully recuperates memory for the purpose of representing the history of the nation. Chapter 3 analyzes the representation of subaltern agency in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance and Timothy Mo's The Redundana of Courage . In chapter 4, I argue that postcolonial theory has been unable to develop a consistent theory of imperialism and of nationalism because of its rejection of Marxism, on the one hand, and its eclectic approach to questions of political economy on the other. I conclude with a critique of one manifestation of this eclecticism; namely, the inconsistency with which terms like “neocolonialism” and “globalization” are invoked by postcolonial theorists. Against this eclecticism, I argue that we need to recuperate the theory of imperialism first developed within the classical Marxist tradition.