Melodrama And The Secular Subject

Melodrama and the Secular Subject argues that, if in the West, melodrama emerged as templates of moral virtue and action to cope with the void once occupied by the authority of the Church and Monarchy, in postcolonial and transnational contexts this argument is turned on its head: melodrama generates models of secular relationality through affective networks of public culture. I situate melodramatic representation in relation to the emergence of the Indian nation as a new global power and the violent assertion of its government as a security state. The changes wrought by recent policies favoring neoliberalization and communal or religious extremism intersect as the popularity of Indian film industries present themselves as crucial nodes in the national and global mediascape. Furthermore, the dissertation argues that India's postcolonial predicament lies in the state's inability to resolve its contradictory definitions of secularism and citizenship. The state's conflicting definitions of secularism -- as separation of state and religion, on the one hand, as respect for religious difference, on the other -- result in an impasse resolved through the violent disavowal of gendered and other difference and the imposition of a single de-facto masculinist Hindu identity. State secular policy casts minoritized women and subaltern groups as the nation's failed citizen subjects, thereby producing a subaltern spectral citizenry. Constituting an aesthetics of "failure," the dissertation argues that those very narrative and aesthetic features used to denigrate postcolonial fiction and Bollywood film melodrama as unrealistic, excessive, and escapist, such as coincidence, impersonation, doublings, and flashbacks, though resembling irrational failures of realist representation, offer alternative concepts of temporality and ethical understanding. Through strategies of public consumption and spectatorial address, the melodramatic representations the dissertation examines, such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Deepa Mehta's film adaptation, Earth, of Bapsi Sidhwa's novel Cracking India, and Manil Suri's novel Death of Vishnu throw into crisis the very category of citizenship. The circuits of affect and action produced in this traffic of melodramatic texts highlight the importance of moving beyond understandings of popular culture as false consciousness or mass culture to public culture, a new site for political expression and intervention. i