Reading with the Runaways, or namesakes in diaspora on Sunjeev Sahota’s the year of the Runaways: A novel

ABSTRACT

Through a series of fragments, vignettes, and a montage, this essay explores the underlying crises of contemporary capitalism and the nation-state as presented in Sunjeev Sahota's 2015 novel The Year of the Runaways. The essay examines the novel's innovative Anglo-Punjabi diglossia as an index of social contradiction and political crisis in the wake of immigration and nationalist reaction in the U.K. It lays out as well the competing pressures that serve to catalyze the production of new diasporic subjectivities and the adoption of non-traditional social practices among Sahota's characters. Along the way, the essay delves into the significance of naming and its relationship to identity via the discourse of the name (nam) in Sikh scripture. The final fragments elaborate upon the opening of new possibilities of selfhood for Sahota's central characters. This opening is premised on, and yet reach beyond, abstract labor-power under capitalist regimes of accumulation and Indian caste and gender norms.

KEYWORDS:

• Punjabi diaspora
• caste and Sikhism
• Marxist cultural criticism
• gender and religion
• novel form

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sahota (2015). All further citations of this work will be given parenthetically.

2 Marx Capital 444, passim.

3 For an analysis of this phrase from Thomas Mann, see Lukács (1964).