IN 2022 my debut novel, Border Less, was published in North America (7.13 Books) and South Asia (HarperCollins India), two spaces of diasporic life and aesthetic legacies that my fiction centers. When the novel was first released in the United States, I was nervous about its reception even if I was proud of the book I’d written. I was nervous mostly because when I transitioned from a world of literary criticism to a world of fiction writing, I learned how much narrative forms harden and tangle with the tastes of the market, especially in the United States, a key player within global anglophone literature. In an industry documented to be predominantly white at the highest levels of literary gatekeeping, I feared that my indie debut as a brown woman writer would mark the end of a dream that had barely begun to manifest.

To my relief, Border Less was received generously by its readers, who appreciated in general the novel’s play with form. In the United States, though, a couple of questions came up often in my conversations with literary gatekeepers, informed readers whose opinions hold power to shape the larger response to a book. Some asked me—explicitly or implicitly—to explain why my book should be called a novel if it employs fragmentation, discontinuity, and perspectives of multiple characters. Others—spoiler alert—asked me to explain why I chose to end my novel with a minor character’s meta-narrative perspective over the main character’s narrative one. What I heard in these recurrent questions was the assumption that a “real” novel is one that maintains continuity of narration and perspective, one that focuses on and pursues until the closing note the protagonist’s inner journey. What I heard here was the assumption that a real novel is the realist novel.

Before I continue I’d like to clarify my intent in sharing this observation. In emphasizing a partial and North American reaction to Border Less, my intention isn’t to condescend to critics or readers who didn’t get it. Neither am I here to dismiss the merits of realism as a narrative form. As an author I’m grateful to every reader who engaged with my debut in all ways they did. As a critic and educator I spent over a decade reading and teaching the realist novel, mainly those authored by Black and brown writers from across the world; it’s a narrative form I still love. Yet as I continued to explain my debut book as a novel to a North American literary community, I couldn’t help wondering: How did the novel, known to be the most versatile of narrative forms, congeal here into such a bordered form? In other words, how did the contemporary American novel become synonymous for so many with the modern realist novel? Who do these literary borders serve, and what’s at stake if we don’t ask these questions?

N HIS groundbreaking book (Knopf, 1993), Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said chronicled the massive growth of the realist novel in recent Western history, especially in the three homes of unparalleled imperial power: England and France in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth. Similar to social media’s capacity for the rapid, mass circulation of ideas today, the realist novel served then as a key tool of Western imperial propaganda, especially through the form’s emphasis on narrative principles that weren’t central to fiction from many other parts of the world, or even to precolonial Europe. Whether we consider the first English novel, Daniel Defoe’s , and its widely popular subset of imitations called Robinsonades, all featuring a protagonist who leaves the motherland to establish a colony elsewhere, or we consider Defoe’s successors—Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and others—the realist novel encoded a web of references and attitudes toward non-Western peoples that bolstered Western imperial expansion.