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This chapter is an analysis of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006). The novel reveals the devastating and continuing effects of colonialism on postcolonial nation-states and its subjects and interrogates the idea of modernity in a rapidly globalizing and furiously shrinking world. Collapsing the singular and exemplary master narrative of capitalist development as an index of global modernity, Desai critiques the homogenous discourse of globalization by suggesting that new forms of global modernity are intensified manifestation of the old processes of colonization, ethnic discrimination, labour exploitation, large-scale displacements, and transnational elitism. The novel also works against the idea of uncomplicated celebrations of the diaspora by turning the lens on transnational migration of precarious labour. Desai’s work reflects her critical preoccupation with the questions of belonging in a world which is compartmentalized by resurgent imperial cartography and powered by the circulation of people, ideas, culture, media, in a space of altered co-ordinates.

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Re-mapping Modernity: Postcolonial Belongings and Migrant Cartographies in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Paromita Chakrabarti

摘要

This chapter is an analysis of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006). The novel reveals the devastating and continuing effects of colonialism on postcolonial nation-states and its subjects and interrogates the idea of modernity in a rapidly globalizing and furiously shrinking world. Collapsing the singular and exemplary master narrative of capitalist development as an index of global modernity, Desai critiques the homogenous discourse of globalization by suggesting that new forms of global modernity are intensified manifestation of the old processes of colonization, ethnic discrimination, labour exploitation, large-scale displacements, and transnational elitism. The novel also works against the idea of uncomplicated celebrations of the diaspora by turning the lens on transnational migration of precarious labour. Desai’s work reflects her critical preoccupation with the questions of belonging in a world which is compartmentalized by resurgent imperial cartography and powered by the circulation of people, ideas, culture, media, in a space of altered co-ordinates.