Domesticating the subaltern in the global novel in English

Abstract

This essay analyses prizewinning postcolonial novels in English from the last two decades that render labourers legible by enfolding them in the domestic novels still dominant in metropolitan reading practices. The figures of Hassan in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Triton in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef, Velutha in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and Ugwu in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, though they initially enter the novels as labourers, are ultimately transformed through their roles in these domestic novels into exceptional figures who transcend class. At the same time, the novels address forms of violence that would seem to challenge the domestic novel’s representational capacities. These novels then perform a double movement, gesturing toward class as a category in their inclusion of these domestic labourers, only to evacuate that category in rewriting the violence they portray as answerable by the personal relationships and identitarian transformations that constitute the genre’s meanings. That the novels thus raise questions of class and subalternity – of relations of domination and subordination – and then translate those relations into other categories posited as primary bearers of textual and social meaning renders the category of class itself subaltern in these texts.