Reading Tahmima Anam’s Postcolonial Fiction- A Golden Age in the Light of Fredrick Jameson’s Concept of ‘National Allegory’

Abstract

Tahmima Anam’s postcolonial fiction- A Golden Age is such a novel that can be called a narrative of the liberation war of Bangladesh. Despite having good art of characterization and universal theme with global appeal, it is plausible to dissect the thought and action of the characters as well as different events of this fiction with the argument of Fredrick Jameson that all the Third-World texts are actually ‘National Allegory’. He asserted that even a text of Third-World seems to contain private feelings and emotions; the underlying meaning is different since the author’s main purpose is to demonstrate the collective state of a nation where individual part matters less. That A Golden Age is a ‘National Allegory’ is the prime concern of this article in which it will be shown how Anam, a daughter of a freedom fighter, has portrayed her characters mainly to articulate the saga of 1971 in Bangladesh (the then East Pakistan).