DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH RESEARCH SEMINAR - 'Dissident Desire and the Rejection of Migration in postcolonial fiction' presented by Dr Humaira Saeed, Nottingham Trent University.

This paper takes as its starting point analysis of global sexualities, in which the west is postulated as a site of freedom and the ultimate location for the expression of non-heteronormative identities and desires. This article proposes that Shyam Selvadurai's The Hungry Ghosts (2013), and Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees (2015), articulate a refusal to see migration as a solution to the articulation of dissident desire, and instead appraise the postcolonial site as one which can facilitate queerness.

Crucially, these novels do not idealise the postcolonial nation, and both incorporate a recognition of the violences non-normative bodies experience, yet this is also framed as mutable - desire can be negotiated within these locales, and it can be reconciled with faith. The weaving of folk stories into both narratives embeds queer desire within the traditions of the locale, and not as a foreign import. These stories inform how the characters understand themselves and how the novels make their desires intelligible.

About our speaker:

Humaira Saeed is a Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University where she teaches and researches across gender, sexuality and postcolonial studies. She is currently PI on a British Academy funded project ‘Exploring Dissident Desire in Postcolonial Texts’, and maintains a scholarly and activist interest in the ways in which queer modes of belonging become asserted through racialized attachments to the nation state.