Jay Parini
In this lucid and wide-ranging book, Yumna Siddiqi explores the intimate connections that exist between power and narrative. Her study begins by looking closely at what she calls 'fictions of intrigue' during the height of Britain's colonial empire, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how certain imperial anxieties found relief in various storytelling strategies. From there, she moves into an examination of the so-called New Empire, following the persistence of certain narrative strategies in the postcolonial world. Her critiques of such writers as Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, and Michael Ondaatje are deeply considered, and revelatory. This is an important book, not only for postcolonial studies but also for literary studies in the broadest sense.
Betty Joseph
Anxieties of Empire is a probing, original account of nineteenth- and twentieth-century detective fiction from Britain and India that reveals the genre's preoccupation with the old and new empires, with national boundaries and the state. The book brings together a wide range of materials and important fictional texts to produce a fascinating historical and literary trajectory of the 'fiction of intrigue' and its afterlives in postcolonial and Anglophone novelistic traditions. Yumna Siddiqi's methodological precision and cultural histories reveal manifold layers of narrative complexity even as she moves the discussion seamlessly between imperial metropole and postcolony. This book will prove valuable reading for all literary scholars, but especially for scholars in nineteenth-century, Victorian, and postcolonial cultural studies.
Chris GoGwilt
Yumna Siddiqi makes a timely and compelling argument for reading contemporary anxieties of empire in the related genres of detective and spy fiction. Her book is a richly rewarding, engaging, and provocative study that reads classic spy thrillers and detective stories of the late colonial period in counterpoint to contemporary classics of postcolonial fiction. This exciting new contribution compels us to read the formulae of detective and spy fiction with a fresh critical sense of urgency.