Indeed, we could argue that the postcolonial world is characterised as a space in which history can never be taken for granted, and is subject always to conflict over past events and their meaning for present generations. The contested nature of postcolonial history is reflected in the literature, as much as in the theory and criticism that describes it. The most well-known novelists of the postcolonial canon (for example, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Margaret Atwood, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nadine Gordimer, Caryl Phillips, and Anita Desai) have all, in one way or another, reflected on how experiences of cross-cultural contact, frontier war, slavery, racism, colonial occupation, and anti-colonial resistance have shaped the modern world. Such books have provoked public debate (and even violent opposition) from those who object to their interpretations. At the same time, literary critics, historians, and cultural theorists have written extensively on how the historical imagination might be transformed by postcoloniality, and by the need to accommodate the contested nature of such representations. Postcolonialism is thus, to a large extent, a discourse of and about the writing of history in multiple forms – one that necessarily engages with debates in which aesthetics are as much at stake as politics.

This book reflects my encounter with this field, exploring the value of postcolonial literature as a resource for learning about histories that lie outside, or athwart, the Eurocentric mainstream. When I first entered university, in New Zealand in the early 2000s, I read widely and perhaps uncritically, treating fiction and non-fiction alike as a means to discover something of the limitless complexity of human societies, past and present. At that time history was integral to political debate. The Treaty of Waitangi settlement process saw material and symbolic compensation being offered to Māori who had lost out in the scramble for land in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, a right-wing backlash was gathering momentum, driven by Pakeha (white settler New Zealanders) who rejected versions of history that seemed to question their claim to belong in the country. The 2005 general election (discussed in Chapter 4) was, to a large extent, fought over competing narratives of colonial history. In this context, postcolonial studies seemed to have immediate relevance. With its invocation of unfamiliar historical settings, rich and strange literary texts, high theory, and psychoanalytic complexity, the field offered a way to combine social critique with a sense of ethical engagement, while affirming (against those who doubted their value) the intellectual necessity of reading novels. As such, I read fiction to learn about history. I looked to historical novels, above all, to discover truths about the world in which I was living, and how it took its present form.

With hindsight, that approach was, in some ways, strange – if by no means unique. Postcolonial literature is dominated by historical novels that claim to preserve lost knowledge or challenge the reductive views of colonisers. Yet it is curious that for writers claiming serious historical intent, their truths about the past are, so often, mediated by the novel form: that is, through a constitutive relationship to fiction, a mode defined by its apparent distance from literal facticity. How does it make sense to write (let alone read) fiction for knowledge about history? When the stories you are telling are likely to be contested by your opponents, why give those critics the latitude to dismiss your account as merely a story? What is the significance of the generic frame – the historical novel itself, with its long history in Western literature – for the postcolonial pasts it is called upon to represent? The answers to these questions are far from intuitive; this book addresses them.

Given the centrality of the genre to postcolonial literature, research on the historical novel from a postcolonial perspective has been surprisingly limited. In fact, apart from my own, there has been no systematic research published on the historical novel as a genre from a postcolonial perspective. Studies of individual historical novels have been produced, and many critics have explored how particular authors or texts engage with issues of the historical imagination. But no study has explored the significance of this genre for postcolonial writing, nor has the question of how postcoloniality has transformed the historical novel yet been approached.

This book fills that gap. It explores how the contemporary historical novel mediates narratives of history in postcolonial contexts – in which the past is frequently a subject of political contestation and public debate – and traces how these conditions have inflected the genre. In doing so, it outlines the contours of a twenty-first-century postcolonial realist aesthetics which, I argue, makes it coherent for writers to claim that their fictional narratives be read as ethically engaged interpretations of the actual past – and, as such, a meaningful source of knowledge about history. I map this genre across three sites of postcoloniality: Australia, New Zealand, and Nigeria. This counter-intuitive but highly productive comparative frame reveals points of similarity and shared purpose between the literatures of settler and non-settler ex-colonies. Notwithstanding obvious differences in their experiences of colonisation and its aftermath, all three of these countries possess substantial, diverse literatures that explore the significance of the past, and engage with the generic conventions of the Anglophone historical novel. They are also places where divergent understandings of history threaten to split the imagined community – whether along the settler/indigenous divide, or across ethno-linguistic fault lines. Comparing these examples thus makes it possible to consider formal and thematic variations generated by local circumstances, and to reveal the impact of politico-cultural particularities on a shared generic frame. In so doing, this book shows that the historical novel is central to the project of postcolonial studies, and proposes new ways to explore the intersections of literary form and historical understanding in the shadow of empire.

This focus necessarily means challenging established ideas in literary scholarship. For much of its existence as a recognised field, postcolonial studies has been suspicious of – when not explicitly hostile to – literary realism. As Neil Lazarus has argued, postcolonialism’s commitment to anti-imperialist radicalism has frequently led critics to privilege the rhetorical impact of representations of history, ‘bracketing as undecidable the question of their epistemological adequacy’ in ways that make it impossible to read novels as interpretations of the actual past (Postcolonial Unconscious 124–5). I agree with Lazarus that this tendency has been reinforced by reading practices in which avant-garde form is treated as the aesthetic cognate of progressive politics. Homi Bhabha’s critique of literary and critical mimeticism as obfuscating the political interestedness of representation (‘Representation and the Colonial Text’ 94), has, at times, become an excuse for dismissing realist texts as complicit with imperialism (see Meinig 11). At other times, those texts have simply been ignored as tangential to the real project of postcolonialism, and its formally experimental, often magical realist canon. My exploration of the historical novel as a genre predicated on the serious interpretation of the past therefore cuts across the practices of a field sometimes more concerned with categorising narratives as pro- or anti-colonial (see Cahalan; Calleja; Ogude; Sharrad; Tompkins; Valle) than with analysing their aesthetic and epistemological nuances. As the editors of the new Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry argue, ‘literature and the aesthetic at large have suffered a regrettable abeyance as prime sites for generating theoretical perspectives on the conditions of the postcolonial’ (Quayson et al. 6). In challenging this tendency, my project answers their call for more explicitly literary engagements with postcolonial fiction (see Sorensen).

At the same time, focusing on the postcolonial inflections of the historical novel requires mainstream scholarship on the genre to confront its Euro-American biases. As Miriam Elizabeth Burstein (45) observes in a bibliographical survey, before the 1980s the historical novel was marginal to Anglophone literary scholarship, unfashionable for its celebration by Marxists like Georg Lukács and – as Diana Wallace (3) notes – ‘damagingly’ associated with women authors. The efflorescence of critical interest that followed the publication of Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism thus tended to emphasise the aesthetic and intellectual sophistication of the genre by distancing it from realist aesthetics, and downplaying any suggestion of a naïve commitment to historical veracity (see Tuite 248; Southgate). As such, one significant debate on the genre focused on whether it reinforces late capitalism’s tendency to replace historical thought with nostalgia (Jameson Postmodernism), or whether postmodern novels challenge the status quo by revealing the constructedness of grand narratives (Hutcheon). What both readings share is the tendency to elide epistemological questions, making the relation of a particular historical novel to the past it represents, or to the archives upon which it is based, marginal to analysis.

This tendency has been reinforced by the emergence of trauma as a popular framework for reading historical fiction. By privileging the impossibility of representation and the unspeakability of memory, trauma psychologises the experience of the past, frequently eliding the intersubjectivity of historical knowledge and ignoring the culturally inflected ways it is produced and disseminated (see Caruth 64; Craps; Eaglestone; Novak; Outka; Van Boheemen-Saaf; Whitehead; Wilcox). The homogenising potential of this theory is rendered explicit by Amy J. Elias’ Sublime Desire (2001), one of the most significant contemporary works on the historical novel. Elias, while claiming geographical breadth, actually assimilates postcolonial texts into a universal category of ‘metahistorical romance’ – one that renders postmodern and postcolonial writing as identical, conceptually analogous ‘reaction formations to the trauma of history itself’ (‘Metahistorical Romance’ 188). This dehistoricising and flattening conclusion is symptomatic of the absence of a specifically postcolonial perspective from analysis of the genre. Rather than eliding the differences between metropolitan experience and the writings of the former empire, we need criticism attuned to specificities of text and context.

This project has now been rendered timely by a renewed interest in literary realism. Critics of British and American writing have observed a ‘significant trend’ toward realism in recently published literature (Dawson 143), and this shift has been reflected by a willingness to challenge the dominance of anti-mimetic postmodernism in historical novel and Neo-Victorian studies (De Groot Consuming History 218; Mitchell History and Cultural Memory 3). Lazarus’ rebuke that postcolonial studies has limited its attention to a ‘selective tradition’ of anti-realist fiction (Postcolonial Unconscious 32) has likewise become less true since its publication. Books by Deborah Shapple Spillman and Ulka Anjaria have traced the ways in which realist aesthetics shape literary texts from the colonial African frontier and 1930s India, respectively. Their work contests reductive understandings of the form as predicated on indefensible reflection theories of representation. They instead show how realist texts – notwithstanding thematic and formal diversity – can be self-reflexive and ambivalent in their desire to articulate truths about the (never fully legible) social world. Elsewhere, there has been renewed interest in Georg Lukács, the major twentieth-century theorist of realism and the historical novel (Andrade ‘Introduction: a Forum on Fiction’; Cunningham; Esty ‘Global Lukács’; Sorensen). Most significant of these works is Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic, which outlines a history of literary realism in the cognitive transformations wrought by the eighteenth-century slave trade. Baucom breaks apart the apparent unity of realist form to reveal a foundational dialectic in the tension between its ‘typifying’ procedures – which populate fictional worlds with representative exemplars abstracted from the social world – and its ‘melancholy’ tendency to provoke humanitarian sympathy for the lives of others. This work provides a key theoretical reference for the model of allegorical realism outlined in Chapter 2 – a model which shows continuity between Lukács’ classical nineteenth-century aesthetics and contemporary writing, even as it reveals how postcolonial texts transform the genre to meet particular representational needs.

Thus, insofar as this project reflects a desire to understand how historical novels can produce knowledge of the past, it seeks to bring literary studies into line with earlier shifts in the discipline of history itself. As is well known, professional history was challenged in the 1970s and ’80s by the postmodern or ‘linguistic’ turn, which drew attention to the tropological structures that shape the representation of the past, and implied – or argued openly in some cases – that historical knowledge was a language-effect rather than description of past reality (Jenkins; LaCapra ‘Rethinking Intellectual History’; Levi-Strauss; White Metahistory). While it is certainly a misreading to suggest that the postmodern turn implied that anything goes in history, many historians and readers did worry that the focus on textuality rather than plausibility made it more difficult to challenge false accounts of the past. Cases like the David Irving libel trial (in which the Holocaust-denier sued his critics and challenged them to prove him wrong), or the ‘history wars’ that broke out in the United States, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere in the 1990s and 2000s, compelled historians to reflect on how they could claim that their work – notwithstanding its textuality – constituted a defensible account of past actuality. The most common strategy (see, for example, Appleby et al.; Boyce ‘Fantasy Island’; Guttenplan; MacIntyre and Clarke) foregrounded the robustness of the historical method, not as a means to discover incontrovertible truths, but as a framework that grounds the plausibility of each interpretation in its intertextual relationship with an archive. In Ann Curthoys and John Docker’s words, contests over the past ‘have a way of driving historians back to the sources’, forcing them to establish their claims in ‘the relationship between historical narration and analysis on the one hand and the documentary and other records on the other’ (232). On this view, it is the intertextual connection between archive and interpretation that allows the past to be debated and collectively evaluated. This process of communal validation through dialogue allows significant variability in interpretation, while ensuring that misguided, pernicious, or absurd accounts can be dismissed. One of my key arguments, therefore, is that just as contests over the meaning of history forced historians to reconceptualise their discipline as a form of interpretive realism, so the contested nature of postcolonial pasts prompts novelists to frame their work vis-à-vis norms of plausibility, verifiability, and the dialogue with archives and alternative accounts. The next chapter shows how this produces a mode of realism rooted neither in conventional (nineteenth-century) tropes, nor in a faith in the transparency of language, but in the requirement that each novel be read as a provisional interpretation of historical evidence, complete only in its constitutive intertextuality.

This book therefore offers an interpretation of the contemporary postcolonial historical novel as a genre committed to producing meaningful knowledge of contested pasts. It advances three core arguments. First, and as I have been suggesting, I argue that notwithstanding its formal diversity the contemporary postcolonial historical novel is characterised by a realist imperative. Realism as I use the term does not refer to a set of conventions such as those associated with canonical European novels like Middlemarch or Madame Bovary – the semiotic codes described by Roland Barthes as creating ‘the reality effect’ (‘The Reality Effect’). Nor does it name a literature of the mundane, nor one committed to reflection theories of representation. Rather, I argue that the genre is realist insofar as it asserts the epistemological claim that fictional narratives about history ought to be treated as serious interpretations of the past, open to dialogue with rival accounts and archival sources. In other words, the historical novel’s realism arises from its commitment to norms of plausibility and verisimilitude that frame narratives as meaningful contributions to knowledge. I argue that this realism is specifically postcolonial insofar as it constitutes an ethico-political and aesthetic response to the cultural significance of history in societies established on the basis of colonial occupation – places where memories of past violence fissure the imagined community, and, as such, become subject to contestation.

Understanding realism in this non-formalist way renders it an effect of the dynamic interplay between novelistic invention and historical claims. My approach thus locates the historical novel within the public sphere as a stimulus to collective reflection on the past, similar though not identical to professional historical writing. The texts I analyse do not presume to recreate a pre-existing reality but rather project interpretations of the past, demanding that their readers infer from fictional elements structures of causal explanation – such that the dramas of typified characters, for example, can be read as representative of large-scale historical processes. Realism in these terms is not antithetical to techniques of literary experimentation such as metafiction or magic realism. In fact, I demonstrate in subsequent chapters how the textual interpretation of events can be achieved through tropes that advance truth-claims by negative implication or irony. As such, I argue that the postcolonial historical novel is a formally and thematically diverse genre centred on a defining epistemological premise: that ‘fiction is a way of knowing’ the past (Fleis...