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This chapter explores the relation between Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean “nation language” poetics and the poems and critical essays of T. S. Eliot. Reading Brathwaite's epic sequence, The Arrivants (1967–73) alongside his essays from the same period, the chapter explains how Eliot's ideas about poetic language and literary tradition provided an agonistic model for Brathwaite's creation of an archipelagic “nation language.” In doing so, it makes three key interventions in this developing field. First, the chapter rejects traditional narratives of postcolonial belatedness in favor of a dynamic model of literary influence that emphasizes the Caribbean poet's ability to resynthesize his problematic Euro‐American inheritance. Second, it admits the insular nature of Eliot's late poetic, but refuses to make Eliot a straw man for modernist Eurocentrism. Finally, it rejects the picture of Brathwaite as a racial essentialist, reading his “nation language” poetics as a product of the uniquely reflexive sovereignties of the postcolonial Caribbean.

This chapter considers the way in which postcolonial Anglophone fiction has addressed the politics of caste. Largely fixated on the communal problem that it reads as the outgrowth of partition, postcolonial fiction has effectively abandoned the caste question in an attempt to create a national consensus. Beginning with V.S Naipaul, one of the few Anglophone writers who address caste, the chapter examines how such a paradigm has been set. Through an analysis of Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things (1997) and a series of novels that figure the servant (Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us (2006), Aravind Adiga's White Tiger (2008)) it is argued that caste has been eclipsed in this body of work by communalism, and “class” politics, the central categories of analysis, a reflection of a desire to map India within a global and globalized, and therefore more readable and transparent, framework of the Hindu and the Muslim, and the rich and the poor. Modernist and postmodern aesthetic practices, in these texts, confirm the ideological fictions underlying more realist writing rather than necessarily challenging them. The chapter juxtaposes this framework with the “castelessness” posited in the work of rising Dalit writer Ajay Navariya. In his fiction “castelessness” appears not as veil, or as “always something else” but in order to underline the structural role of caste for all figures of modernity, as well as to challenge the assumption that caste is a problem reserved exclusively for the Dalit.

The Afterword sums up the permutations of homeness found in these examples of post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature. The connotative range of ‘home’ is wide, extending from the most private and concrete to the large and possibly elusive, metaphorical, and idealist. It also raises, and tries to answer, the question about the future of this new foreign-language variant of contemporary Lebanese literature which seems so far to be still steeped in the memories of war(s). The unfinished trauma of this harrowing experience for those who do remember, however little that may be, has predictably been showing its narratological symptoms in the post-war, here synonymous with the post-traumatic, phase. By expressing what has been silenced and repressed, the Anglophone literary constructions of the selected authors' generation-based experiences amount to testimonies that will be required to achieve so much as an outline of Lebanon's possible futures.

This Introduction establishes the historical and theoretical framework for this study. It argues that scholarship on Anglophone Malaysian literature has tended towards a limited focus on race and nation-building, thus ignoring other quietist, intangible dimensions that are equally, if not more, profound in their impact on the fashioning of identities in a country fraught with racial-religious tensions. This chapter begins with a brief outline of Malaysia's colonial and postcolonial histories and the way they have shaped contemporary Malaysian identity, and by extension, its Anglophone literature. It then mounts a defense with regard to the importance of a psychoanalytical and poststructuralist reading of texts in order understand the way in which religion and the religious is experienced on intimate levels, and what these experiences means for the different individuals whose identity is also undercut by race, class and gender.

The introductory chapter is divided into two sections: the first one, focusing on roots, is a review of Arabic-language Lebanese war literature of the 1970s and 1980s, its main authors, and trends, with some references to Francophone Lebanese literature; the second one, focusing on routes, is an overview of post-war Anglophone literature as a phenomenon of the last fourteen years. It explains why and how, emerging a few years after peace had been achieved in Lebanon in 1990, these narratives display a newer version of ‘survivor memory’, as defined by Marianne Hirsch, in the form of a generation-specific consciousness, one alternatively replete with irony, parody, nostalgia, and critiques of self and nation. It focuses on the cross-cultural aspect of these texts in two ways: on these authors' views on writing in a foreign language; and on several critics' observations on the increased diversification of Lebanese literature. Drawing on theories of transnational literatures, it argues that these novels characterise a new literary and cultural phenomenon, and have founded what is predicted to become a fuller-fledged branch of Lebanese diasporic literature. By questioning home from a spatial and a temporal distance, these texts offer different visions of ‘Lebaneseness’ in the twenty-first century.

This chapter analyzes the fiction of Amit Chaudhuri, who had been the most articulate voice in expressing a persistent critique of the ethos of the national allegory that had, at one point, come to be nearly synonymous with Anglophone Indian literature. The clearest enunciation of this critique was The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, which he edited, in particular, in the essays that form the editorial introduction to the volume. In these essays, Chaudhuri points out that notwithstanding the national allegory's claims to a subversive and experimental narrative form, the genre is driven by an ideological conformity to the Nehruvian vision of modern India. Chaudhuri provides a valuable alternative tradition of contemporary postcolonial writing that deserves far greater attention than it has received so far. The publication of his anthology in 2001 is a pivotal moment in the articulation of this tradition.

This concluding chapter explains that younger scholars are better equipped to handle Japanese language sources than many of the generation that followed the wartime-trained specialists. The Inter-University Center and the considerable improvement in language training at universities may be cited for this development. They also are producing works much more sophisticated, and seen from perspectives that had escaped the older generation. The chapter, however, notes one minor “failing,” which is the apparent lack of interest in the Anglophone literature produced from the mid-nineteenth century through the early postwar years. These works can be utilized to give historical continuity to any analysis and interpretation of modern Japanese history.