The Post-Postcolonial Spectacle: Culture Industries after Empire in Midnight’s Children and A Brief History of Seven Killings

Abstract

Contemporary Anglophone literatures offer a window into the transitional phase of colonial history wherein what Guy Debord called the “spectacle” of the Euro-American culture industry spreads to the colonies and reshapes the dynamics of decolonization and postcoloniality. This essay examines this phase through a comparison of two postcolonial epics, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Despite the geographical and cultural distance between their former British territories of India and Jamaica, both novels chronicle the transition from an era of British imperialism to a succeeding era of US-centered, North-South, capitalist influence, and both depict their nations’ contemporary identities as outgrowths of the moment at which imperial norms and institutions are eclipsed by the spectacular effects of US film genres. Both further suggest the possibility that Indianness and Jamaicanness may retain kernels of authenticity through the survival of indigenous belief systems. Through their respectively magic-realist and spiritualist aesthetic forms, Rushdie and James gesture toward a space of indigenous reinscription that may hold the potential to resist the imported, artificial ideals of postmodernity. Read together, the novels provide a comparative frame for assessing the transnational legacies of British imperialism; the transition to a decolonized era of globalized, post-modern mediatization; the enduring place and potential of indigenous, precolonial belief systems; and the impact of all of these on the contemporary Anglophone novel.