WITHOUT BORDERS: THE POSTNATIONAL IMAGINATION IN CONTEMPORARY ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Abstract

This dissertation takes as its argumentative center what Benedict Anderson names the “anomaly of nationalism.” More specifically, it aims to challenge this hegemonic force and its influence on individual creativity through examination of works in which the global and communal supplant the national. To confront and in many ways perpetuate nationality’s loss of prominence, authors and artists from diverse backgrounds that share a place in the global culture of arts have adopted unique ways to interface with the fading hegemon while also positing concepts of what may supplant it. This creative mode is named the “postnational imagination” in a nod to the work of critical posthumanist thinkers who identify a new subjectivity informed by the drastic changes in the world that have inextricably altered the classical construction of humanism and reliance on the nation state as a means of making political power legible. This creative mode represents a way of being in the world that appears emergent but is in fact already at work in the forms of mass migration, global culture, and transnational economics. Multiple novels are used to formulate the postnational imagination and illustrate ways in which it functions: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller, and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. In addition to these texts, this dissertation also interrogates the music and video imagery of the artists Swet Shop Boys and M.I.A. The importance of the postnational imagination lies in its use as a tool of both critique and world rebuilding. Perhaps most vitally, it contains a necessary optimism that is acknowledged in the focus works and is tied to a mode of thinking often attributed to Antonio Gramsci: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” The included artists are not concerned with the completion of the globalization process—an unreachable horizon—but with the realization of ways of being without nation while thriving within a worldly community.