PALLAVI RASTOGI is an associate professor of English at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa.

“Articulating a persuasive theory of the disaster unconscious, Pallavi Rastogi’s narratology of postcolonial disaster fiction highlights the ways in which literary texts attempt to redress disasters on both aesthetic and pedagogical registers. Through a set of close readings that revivify some of the foundational concerns of postcolonial theory—including the centrality of the nation-state—this book at the same time retools postcolonial studies to address newly emerging challenges. A must-read.” —Gaurav Desai, author of Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian Imagination
 

“Pallavi Rastogi reanimates the core concerns of postcolonial studies about social and political justice by outlining a disaster unconscious of twenty-first century literature from Southern Africa and South Asia. Rastogi shows how old questions are new again as the many disasters of the twenty-first century—from nuclear war to AIDS to economic collapse to earthquakes and tsunamis—entail an urgent rethinking of crisis, catastrophe, narrative, and healing.” —Yogita Goyal, author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature
 

“As climate change deepens planetary compound crises—of unstable markets, poor crop yields, new pandemics, and refugee displacement—this book’s examination of time, narrative, and disaster will remain essential reading for years to come.” —Treasa De Loughry, Wasafiri

“Disaster fiction, in Rastogi’s impressive and commanding analysis, is not a sensationalist thrill ride, but a surprising route to the core concerns of anticolonial art and politics.” —Liam O’Loughlin, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 
 
“Postcolonial Disaster . . . engages with and articulates contemporary forms of the originary concerns of postcolonial theory, and pushes back on mostly accepted ideas of canon formation. Truly a book for our times.” —Meghan Gorman-DaRif, South Asian Review 

“Rastogi’s . . . focus on the pedagogical aspect of disaster stories . . . is particularly compelling in our current disaster ridden historical moment. Postcolonial Disaster teaches us how to read such stories—and especially their fictional counterparts—as aesthetic objects and as crucial tools for future survival. As much as scholars of postcolonial literature, disaster, trauma, narratology, and environmental humanities (among others) will find Rastogi’s text instructive, so might the casual reader of contemporary fiction. As timely as Rastogi’s book is now, it promises only to become more so as we push forward into an increasingly climate-changing world.” —Carolyn Ownbey, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies