SETTLEMENT FICTIONS: GLOBAL SOUTH LITERATURE and the POSTCOLONIAL URBAN IMAGINARY by CAROLYN PATRICIA MALCOM a Dissertation Subm
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SETTLEMENT FICTIONS: GLOBAL SOUTH LITERATURE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL URBAN IMAGINARY by CAROLYN PATRICIA MALCOM 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 Richard Dienst And approved by ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ _____________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Settlement Fictions: Global South Literature and the Postcolonial Urban Imaginary” By CAROLYN PATRICIA MALCOM Dissertation Director: Richard Dienst This dissertation traces the emergence of overlooked articulations of the megacity in contemporary postcolonial novels. Representations of non-Western cities and informal settlements or “slums” in global popular culture and Anglophone urban commentary enact a series of elisions -- making poor women and their economic and social activities invisible, allowing the volatile space of the street to stand in for all noteworthy space, and ignoring the progressive energies of slum-based social movements by equating them with religious extremism and other radicalisms. Postcolonial novelists, this dissertation argues, challenge these elisions by crafting what I term settlement fictions: narratives that foreground the unforeseen intra- community relationships, hidden spaces of work and laboring solidarities, and flexible approaches to spatial politics engendered by impoverished megacity life. Analyzing urban images of the Global South in film, journalism, visual culture, and literature, I suggest that ii contemporary African, Indian, and Caribbean writers, including Chris Abani, Zakes Mda, Rohinton Mistry, and Patrick Chamoiseau, loosen the bonds that have heretofore tightly associated the imagined megacity with the fate of postcolonial nations embedded in a global system of exploitative capitalism. While recognizing the importance of both neoliberalism and colonialism in shaping modern urbanization, the writers I discuss push critics to see non-Western megacities equally as incubators of original urban social practices. My work draws upon theories of everyday practice, transnational governance, the gendering of postmodern labor, and micro- politics to clarify the local, regional, and global significance of these practices. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my committee for their input on this project. John McClure introduced me to many of the novels I discuss here and provided spirited responses to my readings of them. Richard Dienst gave useful feedback on the overall shape of the project and was unfazed by its many transformations. Michelle Stephens was a supportive voice pushing me to see important critiques I had been making without realizing it. Both she and David Eng offered incisive, late-stage readings of the project that helped me articulate its major interventions. The support of my friends and family was invaluable at every stage of research and writing. Caitlin Ryan, Liz Reich, and Anantha Sudhakar spent countless hours talking with me about the dissertation, offering brilliant advice and loyal friendship. The Tenchs, Thompsons, and Alvarados sent cheerful support all throughout the process. I am so lucky to have Liz Alvarado as a sister and Pam Malcom as a mother, both of whom I thank for believing in me and for their love. Finally, this work is dedicated to IV Tench. There are no words to thank him for all the little things and really big things he has done to help me get here. Plus, he is the one who made me watch City of God -- and so is clearly the real mastermind behind this project. iv Table of Contents Title Page i Abstract ii-iii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v List of Illustrations vi Introduction: The Megacity in Global Discourse and Global South Literature 1-34 From Spectacles of Power to Everyday Practice Chapter One: Narrating Development in the ‘Violent” Megacity: 35-86 The Relational Bildungsroman in Chris Abani’s Graceland and Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying Chapter Two: Precarious Spaces, Interwoven Lives: Everyday Labor in 87-113 Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance Chapter Three: The Right to (Change) the City: Shantytown Resistance from 114-152 Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco to the Abahlali baseMjondolo Shack-Dweller’s Movement Conclusion: The Megacity and the Global South 153-158 v List of Illustrations The View From Above, District 9 23 Chauffeur and a Mercedes, Malabar Hill 88 Recurring Iconography, The Harder They Come and City of God 117 vi 1 Introduction The Megacity in Global Discourse and Global South Literature: From Spectacles of Power to Everyday Practice In 2002, Miramax released City of God (Cidade de Deus), Brazilian director Fernando Mereilles’s film adaptation of Paulo Lins’ 1997 semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The movie tells what one of the film’s English-language trailers called “a story the world needs to know”: a chronicle of escalating poverty, state neglect, and gang violence in a remote urban setting fifteen miles from the gorgeous beaches of downtown Rio. Its subject matter was hardly unprecedented when it was released, recollecting American films made in the early 1990s about black youth living and dying in the ghettos of south-central LA, such as Boyz n the Hood (1991), South Central (1992), and Menace II Society (1993). However, the setting and scope of Mereilles’s film offered viewers something definitively new. City of God takes the viewer through the development of a Third World slum, from a modest, government-built housing project to a teeming, lawless netherworld, over several decades, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Beyond its familiar story of underprivileged youth fruitlessly navigating circumstances of entrenched poverty, then, City of God foregrounds the crisis inducing forms of urbanization that defined and shaped countless cities in the developing world over the last third of the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, urban growth in the developing world has been an unplanned, largely uncontrollable affair, in which recent arrivals to cities, driven by poverty, war, 2 and economic policies prompting upheaval in the global countryside, find places to live by turning to illegal and informal housing settlements – by becoming “squatters” on the outskirts of faltering urban centers. Today, around 1 billion people, a third of the global urban population, lives in what the United Nations defines as a slum: a low-income urban neighborhood made up of substandard, often self-constructed dwellings, characterized by high population density, lack of basic services such as safe drinking water, toilets, and electricity, extreme environmental hazards, and insecurity of tenure.1 The vast majority of slum-dwellers worldwide – some 94 percent – live in the developing world. An estimated 60 percent live in Asia, 20 percent live in Africa and 14 percent live in Latin America. Only 6 percent live in Europe and the rest of the developed world.2 In extreme cases, such as the Amazon and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, more than 80 percent of new urban residents will live in slums indefinitely, with no hope of moving up or gaining better housing, making the urbanization of these regions synonymous with the massive reproduction of slums.3 City of God was the first film to historicize the development of the late twentieth/ early-twenty-first-century Third World slum, and it does so through a specific combination of narrative and mise-en-scene. Visually speaking, the film employs techniques well known from early examples of cinematic neo-realism: scenes were shot on-location in Rio’s favelas, using handheld cameras and featuring untrained actors drawn directly from the Cidade de Deus and other local neighborhoods. The real-life setting of the film quickly reveals itself as more than a visually compelling backdrop to 1 UN-Habitat, The Challenge of Slums, xxv. 2 Ibid. 3 Davis, Planet of Slums, 17-18. 3 the narrative action -- the title slum becomes a character, both in the movie and in the segment of Brazilian history it recounts. Much of the film details the growing up of three teenage gangsters -- Shaggy, Benny, and Lil’ Ze -- and an aspiring photographer, Rocket, in the Cidade de Deus. Interspersed with the scenes that tell of their development, however, are shots establishing the slum’s own progressive maturation – its growth into its contemporary degraded state. Quick and piercing, these shots add visual data to the housing project’s original rows of pastel-colored, asbestos block housing, revealing the accumulation of more buildings, more stories on houses, more people, debris, traffic, and animals. Brightly lit and often staged in the early morning, these evocations of slum- growth appear on the heels of the dimly lit, nighttime scenes of gang violence and partying through which the characters’ overlapping stories are told. They create the sensation of repeatedly “waking up” to a larger, more menacing environment, forcing the viewer to confront the spatial-historical trajectory in which the slum has concomitantly expanded and deteriorated over time. The passage of time in City of God is thus synchronically linked to the growth of an urban slum (shown visually) and to the collapse of social values (plotted narratively). In 2004, social commentator and urban historian Mike Davis published an article in the New Left Review entitled