Shakti Jaising ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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© [2011] Shakti Jaising ALL RIGHTS RESERVED RECASTING COLONIALISM, REWRITING HISTORY: CULTURE AND IMAGINATION IN THE NEOLIBERAL PRESENT by SHAKTI YOGESHKUMAR JAISING A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English written under the direction of María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2011 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Recasting Colonialism, Rewriting History: Culture and Imagination in the Neoliberal Present By SHAKTI YOGESHKUMAR JAISING Dissertation Director: María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo This dissertation brings the tools of literary and cultural analysis to the study of contemporary neoliberalism, a globally dominant political, economic and moral vision that limits the regulatory role of government while expanding the reach of capital into social life. While much scholarship on neoliberalism has emphasized the social and material changes it has ushered since the 1980s, my project attends also to its cultural manifestations and ideological dimensions, particularly to the ways in which its utopian free market ideology remakes the present by rewriting histories of colonial domination. Drawing on recent scholarship on neoliberalism— by social scientists like David Harvey, postcolonial and race theorists like Stuart Hall, and literary and cultural historians like Fredric Jameson— I show how contemporary global culture participates in and responds to the rise of neoliberal utopianism. In my introduction, I establish how regional hegemons and global powers like the United States, South Africa, and India adopt neoliberal policies, thereby destroying not only existing public assets but also collective memory. Considering an array of Anglophone texts from the last two decades— ii including U.S. journalism and travel writing, South African memoir and testimony, award-winning Indian novels, and internationally-acclaimed cinema— each of my following chapters tracks the new narratives of the present and the past that have arisen in these national contexts in conjunction with their turn to neoliberal methods of profit- making and state-building. I reveal how the uncritical revival of colonial discourse, the recasting of colonial violence as moral failure, and the exoticization of colonial-era intercultural contact, lead to the radical rewriting of histories of colonialism, at the very moment when only a frank acknowledgement of these histories and their ongoing legacies might enable us to begin to repair the damage done. As opposed to theories of globalization that emphasize the radical newness of the contemporary geopolitical order, my dissertation illustrates both the discontinuities and continuities between the regimes of domination that characterize the neoliberal present and the period of European colonization. iii Acknowledgement This dissertation has benefited from the insight and loving support of a number of scholars, friends, and well-wishers. I am fortunate to have been guided by brilliant and truly generous advisors. To Josefina Saldana, John McClure and Sonali Perera I offer my heartfelt gratitude for their lively intellect and keen intuition. Their comments invariably complemented one another in exciting and unexpected ways, and meetings with them have yielded some of the most formative exchanges of my scholarly life. I thank them for trusting in this project through its various, often incoherent, incarnations— and for patiently reflecting back to me what is best in my vision even when challenging me with their astute critique. I also deeply appreciate their humanity, sense of humor, and commitment to social justice. I could not have asked for more worthy or inspiring models as I find my way as a scholar and teacher. I would also like to thank Brent Hayes Edwards, who has known this dissertation at its earliest and final stages. I am grateful to him for his invaluable mentorship during my oral exams and for later acting as outside reader and enabling me to look back at my work with fresh eyes. I have many to thank in the Rutgers English department. The incredible warmth and helpfulness of Courtney Borack, Eileen Faherty, and Cheryl Robinson has allowed me to feel at home in Murray Hall for the last several years. My classes with Professors David Eng, John McClure, Michael McKeon, Sonali Perera, Josie Saldana, Cheryl Wall, and Edlie Wong laid the intellectual foundation for this dissertation and continue to shape my thinking in profound ways. Finally, none of my graduate work would have been possible without the generous financial support I received in the form of assistantships iv and departmental fellowships. I would like to especially thank Professor Michael McKeon for supporting graduate student dissertations— and all the members of his 2009 Mellon dissertation seminar for their excellent feedback on a section of my third chapter. Within the larger Rutgers community, the Institute for Research on Women (IRW) and the Center for Race and Ethnicity (CRE) have provided vibrant spaces for interdisciplinary conversation. I thank Professors Dorothy L. Hodgson and Beth Hutchison, and all the members of the 2008-2009 IRW seminar, for their incredibly helpful comments on an early draft of chapter two. My dissertation also benefited from the exceptional insight of everyone at the CRE. Our weekly work sessions at the Center provided some of the best scholarly training I have received—and the camaraderie kept me intellectually and spiritually alive during my final years of graduate study. To Mia Kissil and all the professors and graduate students at the CRE I offer my sincere and heartfelt thanks. I am indebted to Professor Keith Wailoo for his wisdom and mentorship; I continue to draw inspiration from his vision of the university as a lively and socially- engaged community of scholars interacting across disciplinary and departmental divides. While at Rutgers, I have enjoyed the fellowship of a number of gifted scholars and dear friends: Sonali Barua, Jill Campaiola, Nellickel Jacob, Carrie Malcom, Nimanthi Rajasingham, Liz Reich, Johanna Rossi-Wagner, Anantha Sudhakar, Fatimah Williams-Castro, and Madhvi Zutshi. I thank them all for their big hearts and for providing much-needed emotional sustenance. I am especially grateful to Carrie Malcom, Liz Reich, Elliott Souder, Anantha Sudhakar, and Mark Vareschi for being astute and lively interlocutors as well as compassionate fellow dissertators. Finally, I would like to thank Nimanthi Rajasingham, who has been a wonderful and inspiring collaborator and v co-facilitator of the postcolonial studies interest group—and Candice Amich, Mark Di Giacomo, and all the group members for giving me a sense of community in the English department. Many sincere thanks to Professor Sonali Perera for being an invaluable faculty mentor to our group. As always, I feel blessed to have the support of my dear sister, Rashmi Jaising, and of beloved friends, Geeta Colaco, Sonali Gulati, Aruna Krishnamurthy, Nivedita Majumdar, Bernadine Mellis, Priya Sen, and Jen Sinton. They have watched me grow, and it is their caring that allows me to stay affirming of all that is good and just in this world, even during the worst of times. To Jen Sinton I owe many things. The least I can say is that this project grew out of our various conversations and has been nourished by her love and faith in me. With deep gratitude for their enduring love, I dedicate this work to my parents, Rajkumari and Yogeshkumar Jaising— who gave me the freedom to appreciate the life of the mind— and to my siblings, Hitesh and Rashmi Jaising— who are always part of my consciousness and of everything I do. vi Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Chapter 1 “Utopian Fantasy and Shock Therapy: The Global in the Post-Cold War U.S. Imaginary” 26 3. Chapter 2 “Public Memory, Private Justice: Testimony and Human Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa” 74 4. Chapter 3 “Visions of Collectivity: Novel and Nation in Post-Liberalization India” 139 5. Conclusion “Spaces of Utopia: The Imaginative Labor of Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema” 192 6. Bibliography 212 7. Curriculum Vitae 220 vii 1 Introduction This project emerged in response to discussions about the supposed newness of the existing geopolitical order. The end of the Cold War and the growing dominance of neoliberal free market ideology produced a proliferation of discourses about a ‘new world order’ of freedom, multiculturalism and human rights— and about the rebirth and renewal of economies and nations in what was being called the ‘era of globalization.’ Such claims about the radical newness of the present found expression in a range of internationally-circulating cultural texts— from political and journalistic discourse to novels, films, and travel writing. My dissertation explores articulations of newness across a variety of turn-of-the-century literary and cultural production from three major Anglophone contexts—the United States, South Africa, and India. This geographically and generically diverse body of texts brings to the surface common modes of imagining that arise at the end of the twentieth century in response to the rise of a neoliberal vision of largescale privatization, deregulation, and competitive capitalism. For neoliberalism, as scholars like David Harvey have shown, is