Abstract
This essay moves away from accounts of social realism, which privilege its political aims over its aesthetic innovations. I argue that social realism written under colonialism was part of a larger intellectual project to rethink the desirability and content of nationalism by testing the limitations and plasticity of the realist mode. I look specifically at moments of self-referentiality in social realist writing as well as in the repeated claims by writers themselves about the mimetic purpose of social realism. In this way, I show how literary realism in the colony lived the dual life of representing the material world and taking on a materiality of its own, as language marked by aspiration and potentiality. This “projective realism” is epitomized by Ahmed Ali's 1940 novel
, by offering an interpretation of history as a performance, a series of snapshots, and gestures definable in synchronic time, provides an idiom from which to rethink the conventional discourse upon which nationalism is founded and raises a profound ambivalence as to which nation this “nationalist” novel in fact references.