Between agency and exhaustion: Indian Anglophone literature and the neoliberal subject

2018-03-06The Indian English (IE) novel was critical to the establishment of the field of Postcolonial Studies in the late twentieth century, particularly in the Western academy. It supplied or reinforced some of postcolonial criticism’s central interpretative frameworks, chiefly through its fixation with the nation as primary theme and referent and its profound formal and linguistic self-consciousness. This dissertation is situated in the aftermath of this high postcolonial moment. It traces the emergence of a ‘new realist’ aesthetics in the twenty-first century by tracking three major shifts in the IE novel’s trajectory in the wake of India’s transition from welfare state to market economy: the use of a denotative and outward-looking realism over the self-conscious and ‘magic realist’ forms of the 1980s and 90s, the replacement of the nation as the IE novel’s basis for subject formation by a transnational neoliberal framework, and the rejection of elite focal characters in favor of subaltern protagonists and narrators. ❧ My overarching claim is that new IE realism builds a framework of the prevailing logics of global capital in India to narrate not its proper subjects—the entrepreneurial and ruling classes—but the very poor, who are marginal to but imbricated in its discourse. I understand new IE realism as a formal experiment, an iteration of classical realism in its intimacy with capital, its surfeit of metonymic and empirical detail, its use of traditional narrative techniques such as omniscience, free indirect discourse, and bildung, and its elaboration of social conditions. That it deploys these seemingly totalizing forms and techniques to narrate not the normative national subject but the subject of poverty locates it in the realm of experiment. The politics of this narration is the dissertation’s primary point of inquiry