The Contemporary Postcolonial Historical Novel: Beyond Anti-Realism

Abstract

History has always been something to fight over, but for the novelists of the postcolonial world, stepping into this contested domain can be especially risky. In societies founded on colonial occupation, the extermination of indigenous populations, anti-imperial violence, or bloody intra-national conflict, fictionalised narratives of the past can never avoid being politically fraught. In the past 15 years, there have been a number of cases in which postcolonial historical novelists have published work exploring contested histories. While some of those texts have been feted as important contributions to national literary traditions, others have been excoriated as opportunistic, aesthetically flawed, or even dishonest in their blending of history and fiction. In 2005–6, for example, Kate Grenville’s Commonwealth-Writers’-Prize-winning The Secret River (2005), which depicts frontier violence in nineteenth-century Australia, was attacked by historians, cultural critics, and political commentators, who described it variously as racist, unpatriotic, implausible (yet predictable), and anachronistic. Likewise, in 2009 the New Zealand writer Witi Ihimaera was accused of plagiarism for interpolating direct quotations from documentary sources and historical texts into his epic of colonial settlement, The Trowenna Sea — a work subsequently withdrawn by its publisher.