The Body in Postcolonial Fiction after the Millennium

Abstract

Since the turn of the millennium, debates in postcolonial studies and world literature have repeatedly shown the realities of empire to be continuing, immediate and visceral. What has been overlooked thus far are the ways in which the bodily has re-emerged in postcolonial cultural production as a receptor to, and vocabulary for, these immanent violences. Fictions from across the global south are drawing with apparently increasing frequency on corporeal lexica in their imaginings of on-going imperial circumstances. At the same time, the new millennium has witnessed the rise, in multiple postcolonial contexts, of speculative genres – science fiction and horror pre-eminent among them – to which the body is central. Together, all of this suggests the need for renewed reflection on the poetics and functions of the bodily in contemporary fictional engagements with empire. This special issue takes up this imperative. Our interest lies with the grammars and technologies offered by the corporeal in postcolonial cultural production since the millennium, and in the possibilities and limitations of these bodily registers. Over the course of this introduction, we outline the material, narrative and theoretical contexts within which we see the body re-emerging as a site of renewed critical and literary or cinematic potential. We return to established analytical categories for the corporeal in postcolonial literary studies, and show that current fictional handlings of the body and embodiment appear resistant to interpretation via these rubrics. Taking our cue both from a materialist theoretical (re)turn that corresponds to the turn of the millennium and from aesthetic developments in literature and film of the same period, we go on to lay the groundwork for an approach to the body as this is currently emerging in contemporary postcolonial and peripheral imaginaries.