Amrita Rahman

PhD thesis:

"Between Escape and Capture: Fugitive Practice in the Post-Independence Caribbean Novel (1960-1990)"

My project examines how post-independence Caribbean novels use form as a fugitive practice to negotiate ideas of freedom and resistance. Rather than treating fugitivity primarily as the literal escape of enslaved people from the plantation, I examine how it can also describe literary strategies for confronting the continuing effects of colonialism and plantocracy. Although Caribbean nations gained political sovereignty in the mid 20th-century, many remain shaped by neo-colonial foreign intervention, ecological crisis, and social structures inherited from European plantation slavery. I explore how Caribbean novels represent life under these conditions of continued constraint while challenging the colonial ideologies that sustain them. By examining writers including Wilson Harris, Erna Brodber, and Sylvia Wynter, I develop the concept of the "fugitive novel" to describe works that resist inherited colonial ways of organising history, identity, and epistemology, demonstrating how formal experimentation can function as a mode of anti-colonial praxis.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

My interest in this research began with my undergraduate dissertation, which explored how Sylvia Wynter uses literary form to develop a counter-humanist critique. I became particularly interested in the novel, due to its paradoxical nature: it is both a product of the market system that has been used to reproduce colonial ideologies and a medium through which writers can redirect its conventions to resist those same structures. I find the unresolved tension that colours the relationship between the postcolonial writer and the novel especially productive, and it continues to shape my research interests.