Beyond Postcolonialism: The Urban and Social Realist Turn in Indian and Nigerian Literatures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Twenty-first century literatures of megacities like Mumbai and Lagos are moving away from the postcolonial condition ascribed to them.Since writing back to the Empire is no longer commensurate with the more accurate representation of their cities, contemporary literatures of Mumbai and Lagos are shifting towards fresh engagements with the extant issues of the present time.Literary trends in India and Nigeria demonstrate an urban turn and a social realist focus on the socio-political landscape of our times that include corruption, inequality and exclusion, unemployment, informal settlements, sanitation, infrastructure, and dysfunctional institutions.While the causes of many of these plights are rooted in colonial practices, their ongoing surge and impact remain debilitating.Contemporary authors continue to acknowledge the colonial histories of the cities they narrate; however, they are now bringing awareness to the present-day problems instead of dwelling on past injustices.These recent narratives, in a genre Ulka Anjaria terms 'the new social realism,' disrupt the comfort zones of middle-classes and aim to stir this group and others into reevaluating their personal and societal actions.I argue that the twenty-first century literary narratives of Mumbai and Lagos, employing diverse and innovative styles, implicate their audience in the perpetuation of prevalent urban problems.Through creative styles and unsettling aesthetics, contemporary city literatures reveal a new social consciousness of the immediate reality.The main corpus examined in this dissertation consists of urban novels and short stories published in the twenty-first century while also drawing from well-established Indian and Nigerian authors' earlier works.I examine the narratives of corruption, formal and informal neighbourhoods, and infrastructure and traffic in Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry, Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo, Last Man in Tower by Aravind Eskicioglu iii Adiga, Graceland by Chris Abani, Breathless in Bombay by Murzban F. Shroff, No God in Sight by Altaf Tyrewala, Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor, and "Birdsong" and Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie.With an emphasis on the present-day, these contemporary urban narratives of Mumbai and Lagos offer social commentary and disrupt what has become habitual, familiar, and unseen.During the journey, I got to know many brilliant and extraordinary people, all of whom I appreciate and admire greatly.I am immensely indebted to the following wonderful individuals: Professor Sarah Casteel happens to be the kindest, smartest, and most conscientious scholar I have met, and it was my good fortune to have had her as my supervisor.She looked out for me from day one.Her patience, tolerance, and understanding made tough days easier.I benefited immeasurably from Professor Casteel'
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".