LARGE WORLDS/SMALL PLACES: CRITICAL COSMOPOLITANISM AND STEREOSCOPIC VISION IN THE GLOBAL POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL by ASDGHIG KARAJAYERLIAN Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Adviser: Dr. Kurt Koenigsberger Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May, 2010 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of ______________________________________________________ candidate for the ________________________________degree *. (signed)_______________________________________________ (chair of the committee) ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ (date) _______________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. DEDICATION To my parents, Nver Apelian and Haroutioun Karajayerlian, who taught me that education is the key; and to my sister Suzanne, who was there to see me through. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………. 3 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………. 5 Chapter I: Viewing the World Stereoscopically: Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the Postcolonial Novel, an Introduction………….………………… 7 Chapter II: Revolution or Evolution: Paths to Globality and Problems of History in V.S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds…………………………………. 42 Chapter III: Imagining the Routes: Global Mobility and Cosmopolitan Commitment in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup………………………… 78 Chapter IV: Between America and the Antipodes: Millennial Culture and its Discontents in Salman Rushdie’s Fury………………………………. 106 Chapter V: Where Marxism, Feminism, and the Occult Meet: Cosmopolitan Resistance in the Global ‘Corporony’ in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow……..... 138 Epilogue: Critical Cosmopolitanism as Stereoscopy and Beyond……………… 173 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………. 180 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Kurt Koenigsberger, for guiding me through this dissertation project from its very early stages of inception in Lebanon, and for tirelessly supporting its various stages of development. My thanks go to my committee members: William Marling, whose feedback on the individual chapters was greatly helpful; Thrity Umrigar, whose insights and constant encouragement helped me overcome the obstacles in the writing process; Gilbert Doho, whose enthusiasm for the project motivated me. The diversity and richness of views among my dissertation committee members helped me broaden my own literary and critical horizons. I thank all my teachers at Case Western Reserve, most notably, Mary Grimm, for supervising my PhD comprehensive exams; Athena Vrettos, for helping me at a crucial stage in my studies; Christopher Flint and Todd Oakley for their interest in my scholarly progress. I would like to acknowledge the Arthur Adrian Dissertation Fellowship I was granted in 2006 from the English Department, and the generous teaching assistantships offered to me there over many years. An acknowledgment is due also to the Lebanese University Scholarship program, with which assistance I completed my Master’s degree at Case. I thank my family—Mom, Jon, Jacqueline, Annie, Suzanne, Seta, and my brother- in-law Zadig—for their unwavering support and loving care; and I hope to become a worthy role-model for Selina and Steve Aintablian. A heartfelt thank you goes out to my fellow graduates and friends at Guilford House and from the Case community who have been on this path before me and along with me—I know I will cherish our camaraderie for many years to come. There are, finally, a number of people whose moral and practical support has been invaluable: May Maalouf, Ahmad Salam, Zahi Ramadan, Mariyanne 3 Rofaiel, Jeanine el-Maasri Wehbe, Tony Masri, and Joanna el-Maasri—I am deeply grateful to you for being my champions and confidants. 4 Large Worlds/Small Places: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Stereoscopic Vision in the Global Postcolonial Novel Abstract by ASDGHIG KARAJAYERLIAN This dissertation looks at the new developments in the politics and narrative style of the global postcolonial novel in the most recent works of Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, namely, Fury, The Pickup, Magic Seeds, and Wizard of the Crow, respectively. I note that in varying degrees, these narratives enact a form of commitment to the postcolonial world that is critically cosmopolitan, situated between a liberal ideology of common humanity and a postcolonial outlook championing resistance. This critical cosmopolitanism moves from a discourse of dislocated subjectivity in postcolonialism to one of the multiply-linked subjectivities of globalization. It does not shun the liberatory potential of global discourses, such as modernity, human rights, and feminism, and it does not hold the “national” as the sole form of resistance to global inequities and the neocolonial threat of a globalized world. In fact, the distance found in these narratives from locality, nativity, and cultural specificity, unsettles the condition of postcoloniality and the binary dynamics of imperial centers and (post)-colonial peripheries, notions that are at the basis of established interpretive paradigms for postcolonial narratives. Taking critical cosmopolitanism as my critical paradigm, instead, I expose in these narratives a desire for globality, namely for a convivial culture and a non- 5 fragmented world, which is attentive nonetheless to the new power relations and the tensions existing in the act of reconciling the local with the global, such as in ethnic conflicts, the plight of illegal immigrants and global strangers, the hegemony of the global “society of the spectacle,” and the various activisms on behalf of the global poor and the dispossessed. I contend that the global postcolonial novels in this dissertation envision the “large worlds” that are at the global forefront always in relation to the “small places” that are within and beyond national demarcations and often below visibility. This double and complex view of globalization, which I denote as stereoscopic vision, fashions a mutually informing critique that surpasses the nation, imperial world-views, and postcolonial geopolitics. It expands onto the world and generates its literature in an era of accelerated globalization. 6 Viewing the World Stereoscopically: Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the Postcolonial Novel, an Introduction “The ambition of extracting a universal from a particular no longer moves us. The very matter of all of those places and the minute or infinite detail and the inspiring combination of all their particularities ought to be set down. To write is to awaken the savor of the world.” —Edouard Glissant, “The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World”, (294) “It gives you—what shall I say—stereoscopic vision, so that you can simultaneously look at two societies from both the inside and the outside. And I think the tensions in that are quite useful; they strike sparks.” —Salman Rushdie, Interview with Jean W. Ross, 1982, (5) Discussing his own experience of being a diasporic Indian writer in England writing in the Anglophone tradition, the postcolonial writer Salman Rushdie in an interview in 1982 notes the stereoscopic vantage of perception his strategic placement in society has afforded him. In a position both belonging to and distanced from English and Indian societies, Rushdie describes the experience of a tension in the grasp of reality that was nonetheless productive and illuminating. As Rushdie writes elsewhere, his experience of migration and expatriation, and the discontinuities it had produced in his life, reveal to him that “human beings [do] not perceive things whole… [they are] cracked lenses capable of fractured perception [;] partial beings, in all the senses of that word” (“Imaginary Homelands” 12). Nonetheless, Rushdie’s “fractured perception” is not a disruption or a loss in vision, but a unique vantage of perception, which results in the displaced writer achieving a stereoscopic vision instead of chasing a tenuous “whole sight” (19). Rushdie’s pronouncements of his sight and insight into multiple cultures, as the epigraph shows, propagate a distinct type of cosmopolitanism, which negates older cosmopolitan aspirations for global mapping and whole sight. Moving away both from 7 older forms of cosmopolitanism, such as planetary humanism, worldliness, or universal belonging, and from stances that are reactionary to the global and dismissive of its potential in postcolonial thought, Rushdie’s stereoscopic vision suggests a critical cosmopolitanism. An alternative to an unattainable planetary sight or insight, this critical cosmopolitanism challenges notions of objective truth and absolute Reason, both of which are nowadays accused by postmodern and postcolonial thinkers alike of leveling out the differences between cultures and sliding into ethnocentric generalizations1. Instead, it critically negotiates a plurality of truths and a multiplicity of differences, accessing and compressing distances rather than leveling out differences, or heralding a cultural universality in the world. It enhances one’s world-view, as it does with Rushdie, by affording one a position of both an insider and an outsider, and enabling a partial attachment to both the cultural or societal