Sarah Jilani

After completing a BA in English at The University of York (2012) and an MSt in English (1900-Present) at The University of Oxford (2013), I was a London-based freelance arts writer for publications including The Economist, The Times Literary Supplement, The Independent and ArtReview. In 2017, I began my PhD at King's College, Cambridge with a joint AHRC-Isaac Newton Trust award.

My thesis considers early postcolonial (1950s-1970s) African and South Asian novels and films for their treatments of subjectivity in relation to decolonisation. The self remains a central concern for postcolonial studies: space and place were the objects of colonial domination, but the subjugation of the colonised, via the refusal and manipulation of their subjecthood, accompanied this. Working with a dialectical and materialist conception of selfhood drawn from the thought of Frantz Fanon, I seek to investigate the relationship between subjectivity and the socio-economic everyday of (neo-/)post-coloniality in these works. I consider, amongst others, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ayi Kwei Armah, Satyajit Ray, Buchi Emecheta, Kamala Markandaya and Ousmane Sembène.

I am also interested in nationhood and nationalisms; Third Cinema theory and practice; realism; materialist feminism; Frantz Fanon; and the mid-twentieth century's Third World internationalisms.