Imagining the Museal

: Curatorial Theory and Practice in the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel

Abstract

This thesis explores literary representations of curation and museums in contemporary postcolonial fiction.
Through analysing the works by Teju Cole, Tania James, Janice Pariat, and Nadeem Aslam, I explore the
ways in which the aesthetic form of the novel facilitates these authors’ critiques of colonialist practices of
collecting, arranging, and displaying material artefacts. The thesis considers how elements such as narrative
form, genre, and style highlight the museum as a space in which postcolonial subjectivities are negated,
reflected, or remade, and cultivate creative reimaginings of the curatorial and the museal.
I begin with Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), which I read through the lens of ‘curationism’. In this chapter, I
show how curation, as a quotidian practice that involves the organisation and re-presentation of objects
and experiences, functions as a strategy of unreliable narration by concealing the violence of both individual
and national pasts. Chapter 2 retraces the violent history of curation by examining its role in imperialism
and the expropriation of cultural artefacts. Through examining Tania James’s 2023 novel Loot, I consider
how the generic characteristics of the postcolonial historical novel enable a rhetorical intervention in the
anti-repatriation rhetoric of the global North. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 turn to the curatorial practices of
the global South, which are often disparaged in justifications against museum repatriation and marginalized
in the curatorial theory and museology of the global North. In Chapter 3, I offer a comparison of the
museum and the novel as alternative forms of representation through reading Janice Pariat’s Everything the
Light Touches (2022). In this chapter, I examine the contrasting ways in which the local museum and the
polyphonic novel attempt to encapsulate indigenous and tribal cultural heritage practices. The fourth and
final chapter analyses Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend (2017) and The Wasted Vigil (2008), and argues that
Aslam’s aesthetics reflects a counter-museology of South Asia that is grounded in vernacular visual culture
and epistemologies.
This thesis argues that the depiction of curation is a means by which the contemporary postcolonial novel
draws attention to itself as an aesthetic artefact. Through the curatorial and the museal, authors represent
experiences of postcoloniality, questions of racial and cultural identity, tangible and intangible heritage, and
the trauma inflicted on both people and objects as a result of colonial violence. However, the curatorial and
the museal are not only aspects of subject and theme, but often become intrinsic parts of the novels’ formal
and stylistic composition. For that reason, this thesis aligns itself with scholarship on postcolonial aesthetics
that opposes the tendency to read postcolonial literary texts exclusively in terms of their political function
at the expense of their aesthetic forms.

Date of Award	13 May 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Madhu Krishnan (Supervisor) & Florian C J Stadtler (Supervisor)