Preface
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The essays gathered here are the second installment of the journal's special issues on "The Postcolonial Novel, Post-9/11." They continue and extend the conversation begun by the first set of essays, some by revisiting texts such as Karan Mahajan's The Association of Small Bombs and others by pursuing themes such as the treatment of immigrants—especially Muslim and brown immigrants in the west post-9/11. The essays are as concerned with matters of form and genre as they are of theme, plot, and characterization. Like my own introduction to the volume (to which I refer readers interested in a larger framing of the issues),1 the essays gathered here, while centrally concerned with the relationship of 9/11 and the postcolonial novel, are also marked by more contemporary events and challenges, whether they be the plight of refugees, BREXIT, the rise of rightwing populism, or the global COVID-19 pandemic.
The introduction I refer to was written in the midst of an alarming rise in the rate of COVID-19 deaths, which I reported then to be 172,836 in the US alone. The number this morning is 321,117. So I still write in the midst of a disaster. And yet, there are also signs of hope. Between that introduction, when I lamented that we had "no concrete indications for a successful vaccination or cure," and now, at least one vaccination has been authorized for use and is currently being administered and others are on their way to approval. Seemingly unrelated to the topic at hand—9/11 and the postcolonial novel—I record this for future readers and guest issue editors. As Carlos Alonzo negotiated the meaning and implications of 9/11 even as he edited PMLA, and as the contributors to these special issues and I have attempted to continue our work in the midst of COVID-19 and the nation's reckoning with racial violence, injustice, and police brutality, we are reminded that no space, not even the so-called ivory tower, is insulated from the societal challenges that confront us. There are signs that we will, with enough resolve, overcome both of these crises. What exactly the new normal will look like has yet to be seen. It is my fervent hope that after what we have experienced in 2020 we will work towards forging a society that is racially [End Page vii] just and that has a robust public health infrastructure and other social safety nets that are accessible to all.
Gaurav Desai is Chair of the Department and Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Subject to Colonialism: African Self-fashioning and the Colonial Library (2001). His latest book, on narratives of Indian Ocean connections between Africa and India, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian Imagination (2013), received the 2014 Rene Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association.
NOTE
1. See "Introduction: Writing About Disaster Amid One," Studies in the Novel 52.4 (Winter 2020): 377–84.
