ABSTRACT
The conclusion tackles the question of the vocation of the epic in a postcolonial and postmodern world. The choice of the epic, a form whose defining structural feature is its obsession with history, would seem extraordinarily conservative in a postmodern age that ‘has forgotten how to think historically in the first place’, to borrow Fredric Jameson’s formulation. For all its explicit or implicit engagements with postmodernism, postcolonial epic – like political epic from which it emerged – ultimately asserts the primacy of the historical referent, but does so through a form of ‘resistant nostalgia’, one that registers its resistance through a self-critical and provisional recuperation of something less block-like than history – call it a missing past. In this context, postcolonial epic expresses utopia through elegy, nostalgically reconstituting transnational microhistories of subaltern solidarity and resistance. Yet, the ephemerality of community in the three texts points to an equally unstable temporality of the utopian in-between. This temporality of irresolution is fundamentally at odds with the vocation of political epic, a form that, for all its aesthetic innovation, has expressed deeply conservative messages linked to the stability and durability of a civilisational model. By constantly deferring the establishment of an unproblematic post-foundation continuum, postcolonial epic revolutionises the genre and marks a major paradigm change in its evolution.
