Longevity and Temporality in Three Postcolonial Speculative Narratives

Abstract

Despite almost thirty years between the years of their publication, Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), M. G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia (2006) and Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (2023) all deploy the trope of longevity to explore temporality in their speculative narratives. The authors use longevity not only to represent histories that are excluded from colonial historiography but also to question the linear temporality that has underpinned colonial and postcolonial projects, one that dichotomises self and other, the modern/ the pre-modern, and the young/ the old. As our analysis shows, the texts instead represent multiple and entangled temporalities that reject these binarisms; forms of heterochronicity that shape the lived experience in a global world.