Overview

Demonstrates that waiting is essential to theorising the relationship between time, power and agency in postcolonial fiction Brings together critical time and postcolonial studies, which produces new directions for both fields Reinvigorates narrative and time analyses by developing a framework that builds from interdisciplinary theories grounded in the literary theory, the social sciences, history, and philosophy Intervenes in theorisations of time and temporality across postcolonial spaces through the analytic of waiting Offers innovative readings of both classic and contemporary postcolonial novels that demonstrate the centrality of waiting to postcolonial temporalities Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time reveals the fundamental, constitutive role of the temporal dimensions of waiting in colonial regimes of time, as well as in postcolonial framings of time, history and agency. Drawing from critical time and postcolonial studies alike, this book argues that the temporality of waiting is an essential concept to theorise the relationship between time and power in postcolonial fiction across the long twentieth century - one that illuminates the contradictory temporalities that underlie narratives of progress, modernization and development. The book contributes to the resurgence of interest in time within literary studies by demonstrating that waiting is also integral to postcolonial temporalities, from anticolonial nationalist movements for independence to forms of reconciliation after conflict. In addition to innovative readings of both classic and contemporary postcolonial novels, this study challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time of acceleration and movement by arguing for the centrality of waiting to time-consciousness in the postcolonial world.

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9781474490207

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"""In this theoretically invigorating study, Amanda Lagji offers comparative close readings of work by authors from Conrad to Ishmael Beah, Armah to Coetzee (amongst others), that presses reset on our tendency to read waiting as stasis, instead recasting apparent impasse as productively disruptive to hegemonic temporalities. A timely and important work."" -Andrew van der Vlies, University of Adelaide"

Author Information

Amanda Lagji is Assistant Professor of English and World Literature at Pitzer College. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures, critical time studies and terrorism and literature. She publishes widely on postcolonial literatures, including chapters in Transnational Africana Women's Fictions (2021), Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the 21st Century (2021), The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law (2021), and Timescapes of Waiting: Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral(2019). Recent articles have been published in Studies in the Novel (2020), Mobilities (2019), Safundi (2018), South Asian Review (2018), and African Literature Today (2016). Her book manuscript won the Northeast Modern Language Association's 2020 Book Award for the Best Unpublished Book Manuscript.

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