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2024 Journal of Postcolonial Writing
doi: 10.1080/17449855.2024.2420718
This article demonstrates the significance of the phrase the “war of the worlds” which occurs as a literary trope in two novels written by Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. It argues that in the former, the trope has a cultural implication connoting an imminent clash of civilizations seen as a postcolonial predicament, while in the latter it operates in a comic melange of fantastical and apocalyptic themes commenting on environmental calamities. These two texts are read together to explore the hermeneutic history of “war of the worlds” in Rushdie, pivoting around the fictional allegory of “war” between two spatial entities or “worlds”. The article argues that the novels showcase two different facets of Rushdie’s engagement with the trope of apocalypse, spanning postcolonial to posthuman themes; these are thematically and stylistically contrastive but overlap in the novels, creating a new narrative.
2024 Journal of Postcolonial Writing
doi: 10.1080/17449855.2024.2430392
This article focuses on two representations of the 1947 India–Pakistan partition in contemporary, 21st-century science fiction and fantasy – the Doctor Who episode “Demons of the Punjab” (2018) produced by the BBC, and the 2022 Disney television mini-series Ms. Marvel. The article studies how both television programmes use the genre conventions of science fiction and fantasy to depict how memories of partition are handed down to subsequent generations of diasporic South Asians. It uses thing theory to study the materiality of memory in these programmes, highlighting how memories of partition are constructed through relationships between humans and things. In the process, both programmes help to create memory-things whose significance is gendered and raced in particularly distinctive ways. Both programmes can then be seen to provide models for valuing a distinctively diasporic and matrilineal heritage that is used in turn to rewrite science fiction and fantasy genre conventions in gendered and racialized terms.
2024 Journal of Postcolonial Writing
doi: 10.1080/17449855.2024.2433024
The practice by Pakistani women of reading anglophone romance-genre novels set in Regency-era England is rooted in the cultural memory of their colonial past. The Regency-era past provides a credible space for the romantic imagination that takes on distinctive postcolonial nuances in Pakistan. The readers involved in this research shared a fascination with the buildings around them that were constructed during the British Raj, and the experience of reading old, browned copies of Georgette Heyer novels. The materiality of the romance genre in Pakistan informs and reinforces readers’ disposition to regard Regency-era historical novels as sociocultural capital. The study elaborates that these readers create a form of positive postcolonial nostalgia by finding parallels between Regency-era England and aspects of contemporary Pakistani society. This perceived similarity is rooted in the patriarchal social structures and archaic cultural practices that persist in 21st-century Pakistan, making the historical setting more relatable to them.
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