Focusing on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century stories of detection, policing, and espionage by British and South Asian writers, Yumna Siddiqi presents an original and compelling exploration of the cultural anxieties created by imperialism. She...
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Focusing on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century stories of detection, policing, and espionage by British and South Asian writers, Yumna Siddiqi presents an original and compelling exploration of the cultural anxieties created by imperialism. She suggests that while colonial writers use narratives of intrigue to endorse imperial rule, postcolonial writers turn the generic conventions and topography of the fiction of intrigue on its head, launching a critique of imperial power that makes the repressive and emancipatory impulses of postcolonial modernity visible.Siddiqi devotes ...
Colonial anxieties and the fiction of intrigue -- Imperial intrigue in an English country house -- Sherlock Holmes and "the cesspool of Empire": the return of the repressed -- The fiction of counterinsurgency -- Intermezzo: postcolonial modernity and the fiction of intrigue -- Police and postcolonial rationality in Amitav Ghosh's The circle of reason -- "Deep in blood": Roy, Rushdie, and the representation of state violence in India -- "The unhistorical dead": violence, history, and narrative in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's ghost -- Conclusion: "power smashes into private lives": cultural politics in the new Empire
