Shankari Chandran’s The Barrier (2017) and the Complex Stakes of Decolonizing Dystopian Writing

The article analyzes the Australian-Sri Lankan writer Shankari Chandran’s
novel The Barrier (2017) as a dystopian novel, exploring how it sets up stakes
around pandemics and the political use of the Ebola virus and vaccines in a
near-future world divided by a barrier between East and West. With its
many twists and turns, the novel, I argue, critiques an unequal and
dystopian global order, with both Eastern and Western Alliances
participating in injustices. The novel makes a powerful decolonial claim,
based on the sacred text the Bhagavad Gita, for faith (not organized religion)
as a generative human capacity, and compellingly entangles this in its
plotline. I analyze this from the perspective of the complex stakes of
decolonizing knowledge as well as dystopian fiction, and argue that
Chandran’s work is part of a wider lineage of South Asian women-authored
utopian and dystopian writing highlighting the importance of inclusivity and
faith. (BB)