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Product Description
In After Empire Michael Gorra explores how three novelists of empire—Paul Scott, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie—have charted the perpetually drawn and perpetually blurred boundaries of identity left in the wake of British imperialism.
Arguing against a model of cultural identity based on race, Gorra begins with Scott's portrait, in The Raj Quartet, of the character Hari Kumar—a seeming oxymoron, an "English boy with a dark brown skin," whose very existence undercuts the belief in an absolute distinction between England and India. He then turns to the opposed figures of Naipaul and Rushdie, the two great novelists of the Indian diaspora. Whereas Naipaul's long and controversial career maps the "deep disorder" spread by both imperialism and its passing, Rushdie demonstrates that certain consequences of that disorder, such as migrancy and mimicry, have themselves become creative forces.
After Empire provides engaging and enlightening readings of postcolonial fiction, showing how imperialism helped shape British national identity—and how, after the end of empire, that identity must now be reconfigured.
Amazon.com Review
In After Empire, author Michael Gorra examines the issues of national identity and ethnicity as they pertain to the post-colonial novels about and out of India. While he touches briefly on earlier chroniclers of the Raj such as Rudyard Kipling and E.M. Forster, he concentrates on three of the most prominent novelists of the post-colonial era: Paul Scott, V.S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie. Mr. Gorra begins with Scott's devastating portrait of the twilight years of the Raj in India, The Raj Quartet, a series of novels written by an Englishman about the British rule of India. He then moves on to the great chronicler of the Indian diaspora,V. S. Naipaul, who is Indian by ancestry and Trinidadian by nationality. Finally, he turns his microscope on the work of the brilliant Bombay-born, London-based Salman Rushdie who sees the consequences of the diaspora event as creative rather than destructive.
After Empire is academic but accessible, and it is fascinating in what it has to say about the effects of Imperialism on the identities of those who colonized and those who were ruled. For anyone interested in the literature of the emerging world, Michael Gorra's book provides a base for thinking about post-colonial literature in general, and not just that from India alone.
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