The postcolonial migrant intellectual: The novel as public intervention (Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa, Buchi Emecheta, Ngugi wa' Thiong'o, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Nigeria)

My dissertation "The Postcolonial Migrant Intellectual: The Novel as Public Intervention" studies four literary intellectuals from former British colonies, Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa, Buchi Emecheta and Ngugi wa' Thiong'o. By examining contemporary migrant novelists from nations of decolonized South Asia and Africa in a comparative framework, I focus on the dynamic and symbiotic relationship between the literary form of the novel and events in the public sphere. My goal in this project is to break out of the current impasse in the debate in postcolonial theory, which either celebrates the postcolonial intellectual as performing the political task of resisting Euro-American cultural hegemony or laments the impossibility of voicing this critique in a world where all avenues and forms of protest have been co-opted. I study the postcolonial novel as a specific form of intellectual intervention in the light of this debate.; I argue that the postcolonial novel inherits two distinct literary traditions: European modernism and anti-colonial literature produced during the mid-twentieth century decolonization movements. Although the growth of the English novel is tied up with the history of imperialism, attention to the history of its consumption in the colonies and to an emphasis on the novel's dialogic form shows that it did not merely perform the ideological work of Empire. In postcolonial contexts, the novel continues the task of criticizing imperialism, religious and ethnic nationalism, and globalization. Cultural representations of nationalism deployed, from the beginning, a feminine iconography for the representation of the nation's geographic and imaginary body. In postcolonial novels, I study the uses of gender in the imaginative construction of national and diasporic communities. I interrogate the symbolic conflation of the nation or immigrant community with the female body. Finally, I argue that the aesthetic of hybridity in the novel provides an alternative space between metropolis and the ex-colony, a space of language and memory, through which writers are able to powerfully expose postcolonial realities and envision possible futures.