Subjectivity and Decolonisation in the Post-Independence Novel and Film

"""In this remarkable study, Sarah Jilani argues for an understanding of postcolonial subject-formation that is inextricable from histories of collective struggle, and for the special contribution of literature and film to the unfinished project of decolonisation. Subjectivity and Decolonisation showcases what historically informed, materially grounded, and politically committed comparative criticism can do."" --Dr Anna Bernard, author of Decolonizing Literature ""Sarah Jilani's ambitious first book, with its study of contestations of selfhood in the ferment of anti-colonial struggle, is timely and necessary. I commend it highly for two of its key achievements. First, it demonstrates a decolonial method by using not only the rich literary and cinematic productions of the global south but also the philosophy and thought emanating from an emergent postcolonial imaginary. Moreover, it builds bridges and solidarities between non-adjacent but comparable cultural moments in South Asia, West Africa, and East Africa through its critical explorations of poetics, cinematics, and narrative, and without flattening difference. Attentive, rigorous, and passionate in its engagement, Subjectivity and Decolonisation in the Post-Independence Novel and Film is a powerful reckoning of historic decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century and the ideas and idealisms which remain relevant in our own benighted time of neocolonial and neo-imperial ascendancies."" --Ankhi Mukherjee, University of Oxford"