Aerial Violence in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature

This thesis examines aerial violence as an organising narrative feature of four contemporary postcolonial novels: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008), Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009), Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner than Skin (2012). It argues that aerial violence creates uncontainable effects – such as nuclear radiation, environmental pollution, the threat of planetary destruction, and insurgent violence – that undermine imperial attempts to achieve global power by controlling the air. The air is so diffuse that it escapes colonial or imperial encirclement. Nevertheless, aerial violence remains the primary mode of imperial warfare in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I interrogate this tension by reading for literary representations of the unintended and often uncontainable effects of aerial violence. I do so by employing two key terms: ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Archive’. I merge an understanding of narrative atmosphere (as setting, mood, and climate) with the term’s environmental meaning (the gaseous layer that provides humans with breath) to demonstrate how the consequences of aerial violence stretch across both a text’s narrative and the planet. I propose that novels are especially adept at handling the scale of aerial violence because they possess unique world-building abilities and create narrative atmospheres that accurately register the environmental and psychosocial impacts of such violence. I then argue that the air retains worldly effects through the creation of stories and moods and thus comes to act as an archive of violence. I focus specifically on contemporary postcolonial novels because aerial violence in the twentieth century emerges directly out of a colonial history. Thus, this thesis provides an intervention in postcolonial literary studies by offering a sustained engagement with literary representations of aerial violence and by arguing that air is integral for thinking through questions of belonging, migration, and warfare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.