Unit:
Κατεύθυνση Λογοτεχνία, πολιτισμός και ΙδεολογίαLibrary of the School of Philosophy
Dissertation committee:
Asimina Karavanta, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, NKUA.
Apostolos Lampropoulos, Professor, University of Bordeaux - Montaigne
William Schultz, Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, NKUA.
Angelos Evangelou, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, NKUA.
Christina Dokou, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, NKUA.
Effie Yiannopoulou, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, AUTh.
Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, AUTh.
Original Title:
Sovereign Claims: Postcolonial Literature in the Era of Globalization
Translated title:
Sovereign Claims: Postcolonial Literature in the Era of Globalization
Summary:
The aim of this research is to explore literary narratives which reveal how postcolonial subjects adopt and adapt to the discourses of globalization in order to consolidate their sovereignty. J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) and Disgrace (1999) expose the ways in which literary and theoretical forms of representation can unwittingly sustain the previously colonized subject in the trajectory of the colonial time. The insidious ways by which globalization consolidates colonial discourses is further examined through a close reading of Aravind Adiga, Indra Sinha and Mahasweta Devi’s literary texts. Adiga’s text The White Tiger (2008) is a postcolonial Bildungsroman in which Balram, an indebted subaltern, conforms to the dictates of neoliberalism in order to escape subalternity. My point of interest is in the epistolary structure of Adiga’s text, which reveals Balram’s neoliberal phantasies about exploiting the effects that trigger the progressive erosion of the state. Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) contemplates the consolidation of phallocentric economies within globalization. A close reading of the relationship between Animal and Anjali explores the modalities of a sovereignty which counters patriarchal and masculinist discourses. The disenchanting dynamics of globalization are often deferred by the insistence of indigenous myths and traditions that illuminate other ways of inhabiting the world. Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha” (1995) documents the irruption of the mythical in the sphere of the political and discloses the ways in which indigenous myths counter the totalizing narratives of globalization. The significance of myths and their reformulation in the present that tackle the encroaching policies of the settler-state are also the focal point of my analysis of Louise Erdrich’s and LeAnne Howe’s literature. Erdrich’s Tracks (1988) and The Bingo Palace (1994) represent a literary genealogy that depicts the struggles of the Anishinaabe to retain their native land through the reconfiguration of their myths and the integration of the casino economy in tribal politics. Lastly, the urgency of imbricating Choctaw myths in the reconsolidation of native sovereignty is explored through LeAnne Howe’s The Shell Shaker (2001) which narrates the compromises of the community to the dictates of the casino economy in order to articulate their sovereign claims.
I develop a dialogue between the aforementioned literary narratives and selected theoretical texts by Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak and Jacques Derrida to further discuss the effects of globalization on the material world of communities and subjects in the literary texts under study as well as on their philosophical, theoretical and mythical discourses. By focusing on Foucault’s analysis of the homo oeconomicus, Spivak’s critical elaboration on subaltern subjectivity, and Derrida’s deconstruction of sovereignty, this dissertation remains attentive to the interruptive silences of various sovereign subjects and their communities that haunt the neoliberal age and tries to contemplate the events and histories that conjure other configurations of the political.
Main subject category:
Language – Literature
Keywords:
postcolonial literature, sovereignty, globalization, neoliberalism, subaltern
Number of references:
233
