Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century By Pallavi Rastogi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century by Pallavi Rastogi Charles Kipng'eno Rono Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century BY PALLAVI RASTOGI Northwestern UP, 2020. ix + 289 pp. ISBN 9780810141742 e-book. Pallavi Rastogi's Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century is a compelling analysis of disaster literature within postcolonial studies. It boasts four chapters systematically divided between three parts, including an introduction and a coda that serves as a conclusion. For readers interested in domesticated concepts of disaster studies into literature, the book provides significant insights. Through its astute creation of narratology for Anglophone postcolonial disaster fictions, the text traces a "dialectic tension" between the Story, i.e., literary elements of the narrative, and the Event, the real-life disaster that the story registers. While rightly observing that this tension is determined by the temporal distance from the inaugurating event, it demonstrates how, on one hand, the narrative tends toward a more imaginative reinvention of the catastrophe when the disaster is more distant from the time of writing and how, on the other hand, disaster predominates over literary when the Event is more recent. As she gathers solid fictions on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the economic disaster in Zimbabwe, the AIDS crisis in South Africa and Botswana, and the geopolitical conflict between India and Pakistan to consolidate this claim, Rastogi revivifies old concerns of postcolonial theory that were prematurely dismissed. The result is a ground-breaking book that offers refreshing accounts of disaster that exceed ineffective ethnographic explanations that postcolonial nation-states relied on as interventions in mitigating effects of disaster. [End Page 152] Partitioned as "Explosion," "Slow Burn," and "Simmer," it ends not with a conventional conclusion that signifies closure but with a brief coda on the Syrian contemporary refugee crisis that canvasses her arguments as she invites the reader to conceive of the book as an emblem for future studies. To achieve her goal, Rastogi develops "Disaster Unconscious," a judicious dialectic interventionism that she reformulates from the works of Fredric Jameson and Neil Lazarus as a check and balance that returns the Event not "to define entirety of the text" (13; emphasis added), but to teach us all "to live with all-pervasiveness of catastrophe while simultaneously resisting it" (11). Her theorization expands the purview of the Unconscious by emphasizing that no matter how far the Story moves from the original Event through genre, style, or time, the Disaster Unconscious refuses "subordinations even in fiction that takes flamboyantly literary claims" (83). While the first chapter foregrounds the issue of temporality in discussing a burst of short lyrical poetry and genre fiction as a diverse assemblage that focuses on rebuilding and reconstructing the havoc wrecked by Sri Lanka's explosive tsunami disaster, those that explore a historically distant Event like the geopolitical conflict between India and Pakistan in Jaspreet Singh's Chef (2008), Mohsin Moni's The Diary of a Social Butterfly (2008), and Manil Suri's The City of Devi (2013) are discussed in the last chapter. The second part, which comprises two chapters, is of striking interest because the Story and the Event in the texts discussed appear to be collapsing under each other, sometimes appearing to be undermining and troubling each other's disaster unconscious. Rastogi's keen sense of austerity helps her out to maintain this push-and-pull balance. In a remarkable example, Rastogi reads economic crisis in Zimbabwean fictions and analyzes how these novels are "Buying Out," i.e., they "consciously turn away from crisis-ridden Zimbabwe" by prioritizing the Story, but the economic disaster can still permeate the texts, rendering attempts to separate the Story from the Event quite impossible. Despite minor conceptual weaknesses, like her presumption that the book is the first to create narratology, it compliments other disaster-related studies. In a close-down ending that disposes scholars to be passively acquiescent in future disaster-related studies, Rastogi deserves kudos for her scholarly erudition, the readability of her original text, and her ability to reorient the reader to the usefulness of a more reparative understanding of disaster literature. Though I would have liked to see more examples...