ABSTRACT
The introduction discusses novels by four postcolonial authors – J.M. Coetzee; Gabriel García Márquez; Margarita Karapanou, and Michael Ondaatje. These novels emerge from a variety of socially fraught contexts – apartheid South Africa, Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, the Greek military junta, and war-torn Sri Lanka – yet are at loggerheads with the literature of political commitment characteristic to each of those situations. These authors assert their aesthetic autonomy over prescriptive understandings of literature, often with the result of being considered politically indifferent. This introduction argues that key concepts within Theodor Adorno's thought allow for a reframed understanding of such supposedly “apolitical” literary texts to show that they are speaking in a unique manner to their specific context. Adorno usefully engages artworks that problematise or dismantle a traditional conception of what constitutes the "political" – overt manifest content that aligns itself with a particular ideological position. While addressing Adorno’s uneven critical response and dissemination in the Anglophone literary world, the introduction showcases Adorno’s reading of the literary text as holding open liberatory and political possibilities.
