"Writing Back" - How non-Western authors represent postcolonial identity in literature

Abstract

"Writing Back" examines and compares how non-Western authors tell the story of the harmful impact of British colonialism on post-colonial conflict and displacement in two of the most ethnically diverse and highly populated countries in the world, India and Nigeria. Grounding their fiction in pivotal historical events and evolving postcolonial geography, critically acclaimed writers Salman Rushdie and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie consider identity through the lens and experiences of complexly intertwined characters who are repeatedly and forcibly exiled across ever changing national borders due to war resulting in migration. Midnight's Children and Half of a Yellow Sun represent common challenges to national unity in newly emerging independent nations that are confined within improbably imposed postcolonial boundaries in terms of the complexity of language and ethnicity, the opening for corruption and propaganda, and the persistence of poverty and inequality.