How does the contemporary novel imagine utopian possibility in the wake of the global dominance of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century?  This chapter suggests that we can discern two forms in which the novel responds to this perceived waning of American power. The first of these is an elegiac strand in the contemporary American novel, which mourns the failure of the American ideal and laments the exhaustion of its historical possibility. The second sees in the same failure of US hegemony not the winding down of a world view, but the emergence of new forms of cultural hybridity, new subject positions that come to thought only now, in the wake of the “American century.” This chapter suggests that, in order to understand the persistence of utopian thinking into the contemporary moment, one has to attend to both of these strands in the novel after American hegemony. The old word is dying, we might say, in an echo of Gramsci’s famous line, and the new cannot be born. It is in this interregnum that we find not only morbid symptoms, but the emergence of new forms of utopian possibility.

This chapter traces the reappearance of key features of literary modernism – especially narrative foretelling and the archival sleuth – in South Asian dictator fiction. It reveals that several techniques credited to Anglo-American modernists became “revenants” in South Asia through affiliative movement toward an unacknowledged middle generation in Latin America. Mohammad Hanif, joined by Salman Rushdie and Mohsin Hamid, portray the specter of political violence in Pakistan by adapting some of the most recognizable traits that boom superstars Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa developed out of their own readings of the North American modernist William Faulkner. Modernist narrative complexity has often been cast as apolitical or even reactionary. In contrast, South Asian authors suggest that such styles undo the easy certainties the dictator offers and uses language to challenge him on the grounds of the literal power to “dictate.” At the same time, Hanif and others use revenant structures to manage the “overheard” quality of writing in English – that is, as a way of addressing two totally distinct audiences at once.

The Epilogue weaves together disparate strands of resistant, worldly thinking under the aegis of Latin America. The scholar Taymiya Zaman uses Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges to decolonize the writing of history. The novelist Karan Mahajan references Bolaño to demand that American readers to approach his version of India on its own terms. And two writers – the despondent Tanuj Solanki and the hopeful Mohsin Hamid – invoke the countershelf at the end of the world.

This chapter illustrates the major claims of the countershelf through its most frequent occupant, Pablo Neruda. Yet his appearance is different than later Latin American authors, who act primarily as stylistic models. Instead, it is Neruda himself who lives on, reincarnated as a “transmigrant,” who acts as a site of internal contestation between projects that are stylistically, even generically, quite distinct. After Neruda’s Nobel Prize and untimely death in the early 1970s, the painter Vivan Sundaram, poets including Agha Shahid Ali, Marie Cruz Gabriel, and Sirsir Kumar Das, and prose writers like Mohsin Hamid and Ravish Kumar all reincarnate Neruda’s persona as a way of thinking about the contest between aesthetic and political commitment through which their own creative endeavors might become global. Their perception of Neruda’s conflictual commitments emerges out of the real arc of his poetic career. These prompt a reconsideration of one of the most discordant – and yet essential – moments of Neruda’s oeuvre: his reincarnation-themed poetry of the first volume of Residencia en la tierra – written while Neruda worked as a consular functionary in British India from 1927 to 1929.

This chapter tracks the development and use of magical realism in South Asia. It argues that realism in the colonial novel grew in a complex fashion, drawing upon elements from fables, myths, puranas and epics. The term's South Asian ‘boom‘ arises in the decolonized context, specifically in the political turmoil of the 1970s, and with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. While the essay offers a through reading of the novel, it situates Rushdie alongside a host of lesser-known English and vernacular-language writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Further, it shows that beyond this time frame the term has been used by writers with tremendous heterogeneity to address social issues ranging from gender, caste, religion, ecology, identity, refugee movements and others. Offering a list of resources, the essay builds a much-needed archive on the vast and diverse examples of magical realism in South Asia.