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)