Screams and laughter: Transfer of affect in Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) writes back against the dominant discourses of race that have come to the fore during the “war on terror”. It aims to affectively engage its readers by forging a relay between “familiar” and “unfamiliar” feelings. Contrary to popular conceptions of postcolonial literatures as resistance, The Blind Man’s Garden mobilizes “potentially novelettish or TV movie-like” narrative devices and the “familiar” feelings that they evoke – the elements often deployed in affect-based late-capitalist culture. However, it moves away from such melodramatic conventions. While providing emotional access to “unfamiliar” feelings, it activates our common experience of post-9/11 media culture, and encloses collective anger in the personal script of shame and anger. Aslam thus provides a conduit for various “unfamiliar” feelings experienced by marginalized peoples in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Through this transfer of affect, Aslam’s text attests to the breadth of textual strategies of postcolonial literatures.