Conflicting Communities The Global Imaginary in the South Asian Anglophone Novel

Abstract

The novel, the nation and the family, arising in the age of colonization, are structures deeply imbricated in each other, providing the imaginaries that sustain each other. The contemporary emergence of  world literature therefore requires a model different from the family. This essay argues that the contemporary South Asian novel centers new modes of affiliation and kinship that are enabled by global institutions—the multinational finance company and the university—in order to provide an alternative to the site of the family, the imagined basis for the nation’s community. By looking at three novelswritten by authors of Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi origins respectively—The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), The Lives of Others (2014), and In the Light of What We Know (2014)—I indicate that rather than a unified ‘global imaginary’ that replaces a previous national one, these characters find themselves imbricated in conflicting contracts of affiliation. It is these contradictory communities that the contemporary South Asian Anglophone novel provides as a model of imagining the world through various acts of affiliation.