How Absurdism Became a Postcolonial Aesthetic: A Drama in Three Scenes

abstract: Can a critical engagement with subcontinental absurdism complicate a dominant understanding of the literary "languages" of the postcolonial, often understood as progressive, nationalist, and realist? The use of the absurdist register in the work of playwrights Syed Waliullah and Sayeed Ahmad metonymizes the distinctive psycho-affective character of this post-independence moment, while also generating a new aesthetic vocabulary for the literatures of the subcontinent. At what point, what moment, does a crisis of meaninglessness transform itself into an organizing aesthetic principle?