ABSTRACT
The relationship between the contemporary postcolonial novelist and the nation must be set within the context of an anticolonial history that has seen ideas of independent nationhood as integral to liberation. The concept that liberation from colonial power has most notably been enacted on a national scale, rather than through local politics, has ensured the prominence of the nation in postcolonial discourses. The role of nationalism in uniting colonised populations made the nation-state a significant banner under which the colonised could respond to empire, providing in theoretical terms an absolute space, necessary for the opposition of a much larger and more powerful theoretical totality: the colonial territory. Supporting the connections between colonialism and postcolonial nationalism, the independent United States adopted almost entirely the colonial boundary without question. In these terms the colonial space is the postcolonial nation, as Mbembe has rightly noted, such boundaries in the contemporary world have a military, economic and religious reality that cements their continuance.
