Subjectivity and Decolonisation in the Post-Independence Novel and Film
By (Author) Sarah Jilani
Edinburgh University Press
Edinburgh University Press
9th April 2026
United Kingdom
Paperback
200
Width 156mm, Height 234mm
The decades following the independences from colonialism saw a pioneering generation of realist novels and films emerge across Africa and South Asia. They told stories of people living through national circumstances fast diverging from the promises of decolonisation.
Subjectivity and Decolonisation in the Post-Independence Novel and Film explores how post-independence texts critique their own political conditions by choosing to narrate a different, but related, problem that which Ngugi wa Thiong'o once called 'decolonising the mind'. Guided by the psycho-political thought of Frantz Fanon, who maps a dialectical relationship between decolonisation and the self, this book considers how eight well known and less studied works from the 1950s1980s. Together, they help us understand how the transformation of subjectivities is a materially consequential process that sits squarely within the broader, unfinished project that is decolonisation.