"Decentring the Aesthetic of Everyday Modernity: Postcolonial Literature, Art, and the 'Fetish of the West'"

This presentation engages Neil Lazarus's materialist critique alongside the theoretical interventions of Frantz Fanon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, and Stuart Hall to interrogate the Eurocentric construction of modernity. It argues that postcolonial literature and visual art do not merely reflect alternative histories of modernity but actively destabilise its dominant epistemologies. Everyday life, inscribed through memory, language, and the body, emerges as a critical site where colonial power is simultaneously reproduced, contested, and reconfigured, giving voice to those historically marginalised by colonial discourse.