Engaging with the specific realities of postcolonial literatures: a discussion of the complex socio-cultural and political contours of contemporary Naga literature in English

Abstract

Contemporary Naga literature in English engages with aspects of State-making, nationalism while it lives in a moment identified as the global. It also inhabits the ‘postcolonial’ terrain given its history of British Colonisation. In other words, even as contemporary Naga literature in English engages with features broadly identified as constituting the postcolonial, due to the multiple socio-political realities it inhabits, it also needs to be read in terms of its specificities. Since contemporary Naga literature in English is embedded in multiple realities, locating it within a single theoretical trajectory can be difficult. This paper attempts to demonstrate that while literatures can be mapped as belonging to the ‘postcolonial’ time, it is difficult to map similarities across literary writings, in terms of literary articulation. © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.