Postcolonial Literature and the World, 2017–2019: Contemporary Complexities

This essay explores some of the directions postcolonial literature seems to be taking in the present moment. It focuses on Diana Evans, Bernardine Evaristo, Guy Gunaratne, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Mohsin Hamid and Helon Habila, and takes a point of departure in three central ideas from the postcolonial theoretical toolbox – (black British) identity, nation and migration. The essay explores how the selected narratives complicate such ideas, by refusing to make identity issues extraordinary or bound up in notions of insurmountable difference, by showing that the nation’s promise of unity is compromised by internal and external forces in the past and the present, and by rethinking migration in ways that bear directly on the central topic of our times, the ongoing refugee crisis that peaked in 2015. The overarching argument pursued in the essay is that although the novels discussed engage in familiar postcolonial terrain, they do so in exciting new ways that force readers to rethink and reconsider identity, nation and migration and to reflect on how these postcolonial concepts operate in and impact upon the external world.