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What happens to postcolonial literature in the wake of 9/11? As the United States went to war under the banner of “Operation Enduring Freedom,” organizations like PEN America and magazines such as Granta and Words Without Borders sought to foreground writing from nations pulled into the orbit of conflict. Unendurable Freedom tells the surprising story of how US literary culture took a keen interest in Anglophone writing and translation after the onset of the “Global War on Terror”—and how postcolonial literature, which ostensibly arose in opposition to Euro-American hegemony, negotiated its unexpected incorporation.
Unendurable Freedom contends that global literature after 9/11 develops ambivalent forms that both invite and deflect imperial interest. Placing novels from South Asia, the Middle East, and their diasporas in dialogue with the memoirs of Guantánamo detainees, Kalyan Nadiminti traces how writers such as Mohammed Hanif, Inaam Kachachi, Jamil Jan Kochai, Salman Rushdie, Ahmed Saadawi, Kamila Shamsie, and Mohamedou Slahi present a knotted critique of US empire as an expression of lost postcolonial sovereignty. Reading across canonical modes—magical realism, the historical novel, the bildungsroman, the human rights novel, and the prison memoir—Nadiminti argues that global narrative mobilizes exhaustion, obsolescence, and contradiction over experimental novelty. Bringing together formal analysis with political theory and literary sociology, Unendurable Freedom explores evolving boundaries between complicity and resistance to draw a compelling new portrait of contemporary literature.
— Yogita Goyal, author of Runaway Genres: Global Afterlives of Slavery
Unendurable Freedom is a study postcolonial critics have been waiting for. Through agile readings of a range of novelists and keen historical analysis of the institutional nature of contemporary literature, Nadiminti’s book teaches us a great deal about how postcolonial fiction has navigated the imaginative and political constraints of a world organized around forever wars.
— Nasser Mufti, author of Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture
Unendurable Freedom opens a path through the complex territory of postcolonial literature after 9/11. With patience, rigor, and careful attention to texture and form, this book shows that the demands of the Anglophone and 'international' literary marketplaces in the twenty-first century are coextensive with the demands of informal empire. This is an unsettling and necessary account of literature’s capacity for absorption in and rebellion against the empires of today.
— Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, author of Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020
What happens when resistance literature is welcomed into the literary institutions of neoliberal empire? Unendurable Freedom offers a bracing account of how the cultural incorporation of anticolonial writers accompanies the geopolitical unincorporation of postcolonial states. Nadiminti reveals how U.S. culture absorbs anti-imperial counternarratives through the liberal networks of creative-writing programs, humanitarian campaigns, and human rights discourse.
— Joseph R. Slaughter, author of Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law