ABSTRACT
By the end of the Second World War, heralded by India’s apparently miraculous seizure of nationhood, the boundaries of the postcolonial utopia became rmly identied with those of the nation. The years since 1947, when India led the way for other colonial states into postcolonial independence, have been marked by the disappointment of nationalist utopias, while at the same time a vibrant and unquenchable utopianism – an irrepressible generation of future thinking – continued in the various postcolonial literatures. By the latter decades of the twentieth century utopian thinking began to take a very dierent turn from preindependence nationalist desire – one aected to some extent by globalization, with its increasing mobility and diasporic movement of peoples, directed to the heimat beyond the nation. Indian literature has led the way in this movement, not only because of the proliferation of South Asian diasporic writing, but also because India itself has thrown the traditional idea of the nation as imagined community into question. African literature shows an even more enthusiastic pre-independence nationalism, but as African nations gradually achieved independence and disappointment quickly set in, a very dierent form of utopianism developed in the writing. Postcolonial utopianism gained much of its character from its problematic relationship with the concept of the nation, a concept that once generated visions of a post-independence utopian future. The critical dimension of utopianism began to replace the ideological elements of pre-independence utopias.
