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Asking if different forms of kinship make different kinds of worlds imaginable, Imagining Community Against the Nation reads the anglophone novel to examine how revolutionaries in postcolonial South Asia re-think the affective institution and metaphor of the family, seen as central to nationalist politics. The reconceptualization of the postcolonial state becomes visible through four distinct figures of the revolutionary in contemporary South Asian Anglophone fiction — the Naxalite, the Islamic fundamentalist, the dissenting soldier, and the student. They elaborate alternative affective models of comradeship, friendship, military brotherhood and ascetic discipleship that are central to their politics. These alternate modes of solidarity open up the varied geographical imaginaries of a communist international of a global south, a world of globalized capital, and a subaltern cosmopolitanism enabled by the world wars.
This book makes an argument for the political turn in the South Asian anglophone novel. Reading works by Kiran Desai, Mohsin Hamid, Neel Mukherjee, Zia Haider Rahman, Pankaj Mishra and Anuk Arudpragasam, Imagining Community Against the Nation demonstrates that the dominant framework of the narration of a national identity for understanding the postcolonial novel in the period post-Independence till the 1990s has obscured the more internationalist, globalized, and regional imaginaries that furnish the political vocabulary and horizon of community in many anglophone novels of the last three decades.
