Kaleidoscopic Sovereignty: Literary Montage and Geopolitical Entanglement in the Postcolonial Sixties

Abstract

Moving from the large-scale analysis to the effects of neocolonialism in everyday life, this essay charts the structural imposition of external forces on the nation space of sovereignty in postcolonial narratives of the sixties. While the geopolitical international intersects closely with individual lives, this relationship is not one of exact replication, but occurs through literary techniques of disproportionality, montage and juxtaposition that register the disjunctions arising out of neocolonial deformations. Examining a range of authors from Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, the essay focuses on the tropes, forms, and narrative strategies through which geopolitical structures and conditions of “the age of three worlds” are expressed through literature.