ABSTRACT
Among the many resonant concepts and critical terms that Benita Parry evokes very powerfully in her work is that of "broken histories." This chapter draws upon Benita Parry's distinctive theorization of the novel of peripheral modernity as one that gives narrative shape to purportedly incommensurable, broken histories and unequal material conditions generated by colonial capitalism and its continuing depredations in the postcolonial period. Parry's materialist reading of colonial violence in part stems from her criticism of the concept of epistemic violence that Gayatri Spivak and other postcolonial theorists have embraced as an interpretive framework for colonial power. For Parry and materialist critics like her, the critical challenge consists in conceptualising histories of the colonizer and the colonized not as separate and incommensurable but as part of a capitalist world-system for which colonialism was a key mode of expansion and accumulation.
