Chapter 18 - Intimacy, Imperialism, and America: Revisiting Post-47 Postcolonial and Asian American Writing

Summary

This chapter addresses two moments in world history: the 1940s, with World War II, decolonization, and the emergence of postcolonial nation-states, and the 1980s, which saw new modes of ethno-nationalism, genocide, the end of the Cold War, and a global reckoning with war trauma. By analyzing two novels that link postcolonial and Asian American literatures – Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate – I argue that their representation of transnational histories of human and ecological trauma provincializes America, as well as the nation-form. Taken together, these novels depict minority lives that negotiate British imperialism in Asia, the Holocaust, the 1947 Partition of India, World War II, Japanese internment, the Cold War, and ecological destruction. These novels map the lost intimacies of four continents in the middle of the twentieth century. They bear witness, inscribe postmemory, and enact genocidal remembrance – and they do so to provincialize the nation as an imagined community. They reveal its consolidation forged in geopolitical violence, and illuminate the unraveling of human rights for those rendered ethno-racial minorities in the nation.