Subjectivity and Decolonisation in the Post-Independence Novel and Film

The decades following the independences from colonialism saw a pioneering generation of realist novels and films emerge across Africa and South Asia. They told stories of people living through national circumstances fast diverging from the promises of decolonisation.
Subjectivity and Decolonisation in the Post-Independence Novel and Film explores how post-independence texts critique their own political conditions by choosing to narrate a different, but related, problem - that which Ngugi wa Thiong’o once called ’decolonising the mind’. Guided by the psycho-political thought of Frantz Fanon, who maps a dialectical relationship between decolonisation and the self, this book considers how eight well known and less studied works from the 1950s-1980s. Together, they help us understand how the transformation of subjectivities is a materially consequential process that sits squarely within the broader, unfinished project that is decolonisation.

Sarah Jilani is a Lecturer in English at City, University of London, and a 2021 AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. She is the author of several articles on postcolonial literatures and film that have appeared in Textual Practice, Interventions, and Journal of Commonwealth Literature, amongst others, and a widely published culture journalist.