In this project, I study the servant figure in some contemporary British fiction – Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, A. S. Byatt's "Morpho Eugenia" and "Art Work," and Maggie Gee's My Cleaner – counterpointed by a "post-anti-colonial" novel, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, in light of the complication of insular and exclusionary notions of the "domestic" by postcolonial and post-nationalist scholarship. The fictional analyses are preceded by a revisiting of the British discourse of the "servant problem" between the eighteenth and the mid twentieth centuries through what I call "servant-problem texts" written by masters and mistresses. In Britain, the servant figure was instrumental in colonial discourses for defining both a middle class status and the hierarchical positioning of Britain in relation to its colonies. The fictional servant in the texts I will study is deeply informed by this colonial history, "Englishness," and the British and "native" servant figure as she/he was constructed over the colonial period. Unlike their predecessors, "new" servants are not identified as "problems" as they were in colonial discourses, but rather they problematize the very assumptions on which the "servant problem" was based.

The aim of this study is to invite attention to the emergence of the servant in contemporary British fiction as a figure informed by a global perspective particularly in works that wrestle with essentialist and hegemonic notions of the nation and "Englishness." In these texts, through the servant, the entanglement of the domestic and the imperial is rendered visible and the "home" emerges as a site where hierarchies of gender, class and race coalesce. The distinction between the political instrumentality of the contemporary fictional servant and that of her/his predecessors lies precisely in this critical emphasis on the imperial scope of the domestic. It is also my contention that the return of the domestic workers (consisting predominantly of immigrant women) to middle-class households in "global cities" of the world, particularly, from the nineteen-eighties onward, informs the "new" ways in which the servant functions politically in not only contemporary British fiction but also in some "post-anti-colonial" fiction.