Abstract

Postcolonial historical fiction destabilizes the conventional notion of time as linear and sequentially unfolding. This paper explores how postcolonial writers employ temporal dissonance—narrative fragmentation, cyclical temporality, and mythic or ancestral time—to subvert colonial historiography and its perception of progress. Through readings of Rushdie, Morrison, and García Márquez, the study demonstrates how disrupted chronologies operate as political and aesthetic practices that recover indigenous temporalities repressed by imperial modernity and reimagine history as plural, dialogic, and ethically charged.

Keywords

Postcolonial Narratives, Historical Fiction, Temporal Dissonance, Nonlinear Time, Colonial Historiography, Narrative Fragmentation, Mythic Temporality, Decolonial Aesthetics, Memory and History, Literary Time.

Conclusion

Temporal dissonance in postcolonial fiction is both aesthetic innovation and decolonial critique. By fragmenting linear temporality, these narratives contest the epistemic dominance of colonial history and reassert memory, myth, and cyclical time as valid modes of knowledge. Rushdie’s fractured nationhood, Morrison’s haunting of trauma, and García Márquez’s spiral temporality collectively reveal that history is not a single continuum but an entanglement of multiple lived times. In doing so, postcolonial writers reclaim the right to imagine time beyond empire and to reinhabit history through plural, ethical remembrance.

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