'Cultural Anxieties and the Invasion of the Domestic in the Postcolonial Thriller'

The thriller is a prime example of a hybrid genre, with its boundaries at least blurred, if not entirely disintegrated. Thrillers have maintained a longstanding popularity and significance on a global scale. Remarking on the predominance of the genre in South Africa, Ranka Primorac describes thrillers as 'part and parcel of how modern Africans make sense of their worlds.' I would argue that one of the key reasons for the genre's continued international success is its flexibility, its capacity to be formed and reformed in a variety of different contexts, which makes it especially useful as a conduit for social commentary. Despite the extensive amount of variety within the genre, ranging from 'pulp fiction to highly literary novels with elements of crime, from cosy mysteries with a sense of closure to fragmented narratives focusing on racial tensions, gender conflicts or the morals of violence,' it has for too long been denounced as 'low' literature and excluded from academic discourse. Even those texts that have found their way into the postcolonial canon which undeniably contain tropes of the thriller, such as Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee, have for the most part had these generic elements minimised or ignored by critics. Although the promising trend of genre theory within postcolonial studies has seen a rise in writing on the crime novel, such as Postcolonial Postmortems by Christine Matzke and Susanne Muhleisen, this is only one iteration of the genre. The postcolonial thriller has therefore gone largely unexplored.
I am interested in focusing my research project on a number of hybrid texts that can be considered as postcolonial while engaging with the generic conventions of the thriller. I would like to explore the ways in which postcolonial writers deploy and subvert these tropes to enable social commentary and critique. While most existing work on genre fiction and the postcolonial has been restricted to examining the literature of one country or continent, I intend to broaden the scope and undertake a comparative analysis of a range of texts from a wide variety of different cultural locations. By engaging with these texts, I believe I will be able to formulate an understanding or conceptualisation not simply of (for example) the South African or French postcolonial thriller but of the genre's cultural impact on a global scale. I also feel this project will be enriched by incorporating film alongside prose fiction, allowing me to consider the cinematic history and conventions of the thriller and how they maybe be brought int