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This dissertation analyses post-colonial Punjabi writing on the left as a critical engagement with literary tradition that re-interprets tropes of resistance embedded in popular, oral genres to articulate political critique in the contemporary. Drawing on Punjabi texts from India, Pakistan, and Britain, I show how this corpus constitutes an imaginative geography of an un-Partitioned Punjab by re-working regional oral texts like the Hir qissa, the Bulleh Shah kafi, and the var of Dulla Bhatti. However, this turn to regional roots can by no means be read as a nostalgic paean to a pristine pre-colonial past. Instead, these post-colonial interpretations of literary tradition are informed by resistance against the oppressions of caste, class, patriarchy, race, dominant religion, and statist authoritarianism. Thus, my readings of Amrita Pritam, Nasreen Anjum Bhatti, Gursharan Singh, Najm Hosain Syed, Ustad Daman, Sant Ram Udasi, Niranjan Singh Noor, Ajmer Coventry and Avtar Singh Sadiq highlight the centrality of contestation and resistance to the living Punjabi literary tradition. I focus attention on how Punjabi intellectuals continued to resist and defy the physical, conceptual, and political borders that empire and post-colonial state alike sought to entrench, de-provincialising Punjabi writing and connecting it with wider debates around decolonisation, feminism, Marxism, revolutionary culture, anti-imperialism, and popular struggle in the global South. More broadly, I draw on this selection of Punjabi writing to explore the relationship between tradition and modernity, and orality and print culture, interrogating the link between pre-colonial pasts and post-colonial futures in visions of liberation.

This thesis investigates post-independence African and South Asian film and literatures for their attention to the fraught relationship between subjectivity and historic decolonisation. Amidst social, political and economic obstacles in the 1950s-80s, a pioneering generation of novels and films emerged. Although they were in many ways "literatures of disillusionment", they also exposed neocolonialism to ask if, and how, resistance was possible. I propose the conceptual node of subjectivity as a polytonal but comprehensive means to read and interpret African and South Asian post-independence novels and films. Offering a materialist approach to the treatment of subjectivity via the thought of Frantz Fanon, I elucidate the dialectical relation between the self and the world that he gestures towards. In an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, I then consider eight texts via this Fanonian approach to subjectivity, pairing one novel and film in each chapter by their common historic critiques. Chapter two considers the problem that women's subjectivities pose to Kenyan and Indian projects of anti-colonial nationalism in A Grain of Wheat (1967) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Home and the World (1984) by Satyajit Ray respectively; chapter three, how postcolonial elites' crises of subjectivity entrench neocolonial material conditions in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) and Ousmane Sembène's Xala (1975); chapter four examines how Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star (1960) and Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra (1982) situate subjective experience as an intervention into Partition and Nigerian Civil War historiographies respectively; and chapter five discusses the relationship between subjectivity and place in Kamala Markandaya's Nectar In A Sieve (1954) and Souleymane Cissé's Work (1978). Demonstrating how paying critical attention to the mutually effectual and co-constitutive relationship between subjectivities and their lived conditions surfaces the structures and effects of the diverse contexts of arrested decolonisation in these texts, this thesis affirms that a materialist approach yields rich inroads into how, and why, structural decolonisation and the "decolonising of minds" are intertwined.

The thesis compares literatures from two political contexts, the postcolonial Indian nation-state and the settler colonial states, Australia and North America. I examine the ways in which Indigenous sovereignty and transnational solidarity is established in literature. This thesis demonstrates that Indigenous demand for land redress is inseparable from claims to literary sovereignty. I theorise a paradox of evidence-between the state's erasure of Indigeneity and colonial knowledge that objectifies Indigeneity to appropriate it in claims of nationhood-that facilitated imperial acquisition of Indigenous land. I argue that the post- independence Indian nation-state replicates this paradox for similar purposes. The thesis studies how Indigenous writers reformulate the literary as evidentiary to resist continued colonisation by the global industrial complex, and intellectual colonisation by the dominant Euro- American and Hindu nationalist discourse in national institutions (universities, museums, and archives). Accordingly, the thesis places Adivasi writings from India in conversation with Native American and Australian First Nations literatures and methods. Chapter 1 provides literary readings on evidence. I explore the "archival poetics" (AP1) and "ethnographic refusal" (A. Simpson 95) in the works of Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Jeanine Leane, Natalie Harkin, and Wendy Rose. Chapter 2 explores the literary manifestation of land-based Indigenous philosophies. I examine Adivasi mythology as political discourse and study the transnational scope of Simon Ortiz's poetry to query the future poetics of the Adivasi factory worker. Chapter 3 focuses on Indigenous literary evidence of the climate crisis. I compare the poetry of Joan Naviyuk Kane and Jacinta Kerketta to study the imagination of absence of jal, jangal, jameen (water, forest, land), and ice. I historicise the recurrent environmental slogan jal, jangal, jameen as climate vocabularies. Lastly, I provide a literary reading of Adivasi philosophies of the non-human in the songs of Bhagban Majhi and Dambu Praska. In Chapter 4, I examine the pan-temporal processes of literary sustenance imagined by Indigenous women writers. I examine the works of Alexis Wright, Basanti Majhi, Regina Marandi, and Mary Tallmountain to study Indigenous literature's movement towards, as Wright terms, "a self-governing literature" (SGL).