Evolution of Individual Agency in Transnational Narratives: Studying Fictionalization of People-State Relationships in Global Anglophone Novels

Abstract

This dissertation examines transnational narratives from the postcolonial world, analyzing how they represent individual agency in different historical periods. It addresses an unexplored area in transnational literary studies with a longitudinal study of the representation of agency in response to transnationally operating people and forces. It follows a qualitative approach by closely reading six Global Anglophone novels set across different geopolitical regions including Kenya, Somalia, India, Pakistan, and an imaginary West African nation over five decades. It uses contrastive analysis to identify differences across and within three types of transnational narratives: early, intermediate, and contemporary. This dissertation argues that transnational narratives portray a progression in individual agency over time as such agency interacts with transnationally operating political and economic forces. Early transnational narratives depict almost powerless protagonists restrained by these forces, while protagonists of intermediate transnational narratives are represented as having some success, leading to contemporary transnational narratives that portray greater individual agency. By tracing this evolution, the dissertation contributes to literary studies by showing how Global Anglophone transnational narratives have been providing postcolonial populations with an evolving imaginative space for negotiating with an increasingly globalized world. It hopes to show that reading Global Anglophone novels as transnational narratives, as narratives not of one nation, as suggested in Frederick Jameson’s “national allegory” framework, but of interactions between different nations, gives more comprehensive insights. This dissertation’s findings propose an extension of Frantz Fanon’s argument that the postcolonial elites were decisive in stifling people’s agency in the early postcolonial era. It suggests that the representation of agency in transnational literature has increasingly been determined by transnationally operating people and forces.