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.