Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction by Susan Watkins (review)

doing without Africa––its darkness, its dangers, and its infectious diseases do not diminish its alluring otherness. In the Naipaulean vein, Postcolonial Disaster also applies the master-slave trope, reproducing an already exposed and explained Africa. Africans prefer to be fed––“Better Fed than Free” (79)––than have a freedom that starves them, perpetuating the exhausted idea that colonized people, like children, are incapable of looking after themselves. The choice between food and freedom is not a real choice; one will invariably choose food––whether African or Western. Thinking of postcolonial discourse in general, one should pay attention to who is developing the theoretical frameworks to engage with the postcolonial world, as well as why and where these frameworks are being developed. An African scholar working in an African university will probably emphasize what Rastogi’s book suppresses: the external interventions into Africa that produced disasters in the first place. Also, the work that Indian postcolonial scholars develop in Western locations is different from those of researchers based in India. This is not to dismiss the works of Indian or African postcolonial scholars working in the West, but to stress the significance of keeping such facts in mind when examining or receiving postcolonial scholarship. Rastogi applies her key concepts to describe the impact of disasters on the postcolonial world, but her descriptions of the postcolonial situation invite more questions and further debate.