Decolonization is presented in dominant accounts as an orderly transition and not the culmination of anticolonial resistance movements. This in turn contributes to what Paul Gilroy terms an endemic “post-imperial melancholia” across contemporary European nations and the removal of empire and its demise from understandings of European history. Drawing on Bill Schwarz’s reconceptualization of a Fanonian commitment to disorder, this article focuses on Britain’s history of colonialism and post-imperial immigration and argues for the mapping of a disorderly aesthetics in works by V. S. Naipaul, Bernardine Evaristo, and Eavan Boland. The three formal features of non-linearity, polyvocality, and environmental imagery enable these writers to bear witness to the complex histories of empire, transatlantic slavery, decolonization, and immigration from the colonial “margins”. These “aesthetics of disorder” counter a dominant narrative of decolonial order and challenge conceptions of British exceptionalism that were reinforced at the moment of imperial decline.

非殖民化在主要方面被认为是有序的过渡，而不是反殖民抵抗运动的高潮。这反过来又助长了保罗·吉尔罗伊（Paul Gilroy）所说的整个当代欧洲国家的地方性“帝国后忧郁症”，并从对欧洲历史的了解中摆脱了帝国及其灭亡。借鉴比尔·施瓦茨（Bill Schwarz）对范诺尼人对混乱的承诺的重新概念化，本文着眼于英国的殖民主义和帝国后移民的历史，并主张对VS奈保尔，伯纳丁·埃瓦里斯托和埃文·博兰德的作品中的混乱美学进行映射。非线性，多义性和环境意象的三种形式特征使这些作家能够见证帝国，跨大西洋奴隶制，非殖民化，以及从殖民地“边缘”移民。这些“无序美学”与殖民​​主义秩序的主流叙述背道而驰，并挑战了在帝国衰落之时得到加强的英国例外主义观念。