SUBVERTING THE IMPERIAL FRONTIER: A BORDER POETICS READING OF RIAZ HASSAN’S THE UNCHOSEN

Abstract

This article examines Riaz Hassan’s The Unchosen through the lens of border poetics, arguing that the novel subverts dominant British imperial representations of the North-West Frontier by narrating the Pak-Afghan border from a bottom-up perspective. Drawing on concepts such as frontier governmentality (Hopkins 2020), the state of exception (Agamben 2005), and the Janus-faced border (van Houtum 2010), the article analyses how the novel renders colonial border-making as both a material practice and an affective disruption. The protagonist’s fragmented testimony, infused with silences and emotional rupture, becomes a vehicle for reclaiming memory against imperial erasure. The novel’s formal structure—marked by testimonial gaps, contrapuntal narration, and political ambivalence—enacts what Schimanski and Wolfe define as border aesthetics, refusing to stabilise meanings and challenging colonial epistemologies. Rather than presenting tribal resistance as heroic and unified, the text foregrounds internal fractures, moral ambiguity, and gendered costs of survival. In doing so, The Unchosen reimagines the imperial frontier as a contested borderscape—one that exposes the violence of indirect rule and restores subaltern voices to the narrative of empire. This study thus contributes to contemporary debates in postcolonial border studies by demonstrating how literary form participates in the politics of spatial imagination and historical memory.

Keywords

Cultural Border Studies, Border Poetics, Frontier Governmentality, Janu-Faced Border, Borderscape, North-West Frontier, Pak-Afghan Border, Pashtuns, Postcolonial Memory