Reimagining Identity and Resistance in Contemporary Postcolonial English Literature

Abstract

In the world literary scene, the contemporary postcolonial English literature represents one of the most vibrant and politically hot branches, which generate texts that grieve colonial dispossession and celebrate cultural survivance, challenge neo-colonial continuation and speculate on the opportunities of decolonised subjectivity. The paper will sustain a critical analysis of how post-imperial writers, mainly Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Edwidge Danticat, and NoViolet Bulawayo, re-invent identity and resistance in and through the remnant forces of colonialism. Based on the theoretical paradigms of notions of Homi K. Bhabha of hybridity and mimicry, the ability of the subaltern to self-represent, as detailed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Frantz Fanon in his psychopolitics of colonial violence and decolonial becoming, and Stuart Hall in his cultural theory of diasporic identity, the paper proposes that identity in postcolonial literature is not a fixed set of definitions to be reclaimed but instead is a subversive and contentious and continually negotiated field that operates in the in-betweenness between the colonial past and the postcolonial present. Resistance, correspondingly, is shown to operate not only through explicit political opposition but through the more subtle and pervasive strategies of narrative subversion, linguistic appropriation, memory recovery, body politics, and the refusal of metropolitan literary conventions. The paper contributes to postcolonial literary studies by demonstrating that the most significant contemporary postcolonial texts develop a critical grammar of agency that exceeds both the celebratory nationalist teleologies of earlier decolonisation literature and the depoliticising tendencies of certain strands of postmodern theory.