Embedded with the World: Place, Displacement, and Relocation in Recent British and Postcolonial Fiction

Abstract

This essay focuses on the role ‘geographical sensibility’ (Robert D. Kaplan) plays in recent developments in British and Anglophone fiction. These changes, I argue, align themselves with other, cognate transformations that appear to be indicative of a transition from the postcolonial paradigm to one dominated by a ‘world literature’ model. The latter, I also suggest, revolves around a new, ‘worlded’ dynamic of space and selfhood, more precisely, of location and identity. If earlier forms of postcolonial literature made a point to situate realistically plots and characters in geographically and historically recognizable locations clearly reminiscent of empires, of the nations-states rising on their ruins, and of available political maps, contemporary British and postcolonial novelists seem keen on strategies that de-situate, re-situate, and otherwise relocate their stories, along with these stories’ settings and people, in the bigger world. To build my argument, I focus on Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers.

Keywords

• contemporary fiction
• embedding
• geocriticism
• identity
• literary mapping
• narrative geopositioning