Introduction

The introduction lays the theoretical groundwork of the book, locating its two major concepts – political epic and postcolonial epic – within the broader history of critical scholarship on the epic. Recognising the variegated conceptions of the epic across cultures, the author narrows her focus to ‘political epic’ epitomised by Valmiki’s Ramayana, transcriptions of the Zulu oral narrative Sunjata and by Virgil’s Aeneid. Foregrounding the largely stable conceptions of political epic formulated by G.W.F. Hegel, Mikhail Bakhtin and Édouard Glissant, she approaches the form as a more unstable, unsettled entity. Drawing from Homi Bhabha’s notions of enunciative ambivalence and nation as narration, she argues that political epic is characterised by a split between message (an essentialist politics of the nation legitimised by a ‘pure’ origin) and medium (a poetics of intertextual borrowing from other cultures). This allows the book’s chiasmatic argument to come into view: while political epic employs a hybrid poetics of migration to express a monocultural politics of nation (a contradiction it must disavow), postcolonial epic allows the genre to come full circle. It deploys a poetics of migration to articulate a politics of migrating identities (a complementary homology it openly advertises). By compounding the tensions already present in political epic, postcolonial epic makes the tradition more amenable to contemporary explorations of the profoundly disruptive nature of colonialism. Prefigured by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and exemplified by the works of Derek Walcott and Amitav Ghosh, postcolonial epic represents a new, transnational avatar of the epic genre. It signals a paradigmatic shift in the epic by demonstrating the genre’s ability to articulate and interrogate contemporary postcolonial concerns of cultural hybridity, historical revisionism and post-independence nation-building.