Biopolitics, Race and Resistance in the Novels of Salman Rushdie Submitted by George William Twigg to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in November 2015 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature: ………………………………………………………….. 1 Abstract The twenty-first century has seen a resurgence of academic interest in biopolitics: the often oppressive political power over human biology, human bodies and their actions that emerges when political technologies concern themselves with and act upon a population as a species rather than as a group of individuals. The publication of new works by theorists including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri has furthered academic understanding of biopolitical attempts to ensure an orderly, productive society. Biopolitics bases these attempts upon optimising the majority population’s health and well-being while constructing simultaneously a subrace of unruly, unproductive bodies against which the majority requires securitising. However, despite the still- proliferating and increasingly diverse recent theoretical work on the subject, little material has appeared examining how literature represents biopolitics or how theories of biopolitics may inform literary criticism. This thesis argues for Salman Rushdie’s novels as an exemplary site of fictional engagement with biopower in their portrayal of the increasingly intense and pervasive biopolitical technologies used in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rushdie has been considered frequently as a novelist who explores political discourses of race and culture. However, analysis of the ways in which he depicts these discourses animating recent biopolitical practices has proven scarcer in Rushdie Studies. This thesis asserts that Rushdie’s novels affirm consistently the desirability of non-racialising polities, but almost always suggest little possibility of constructing such communities. In the process, it will reveal that he represents more numerous and varied forms of racialisation than has been supposed previously. This study considers how Rushdie describes biopolitical racialisation by state and superrace alike, the massacres of subraces that often ensue, how biopower operates and is resisted in space, and the discursive and practical forms this resistance takes. Contrasting Rushdie’s early fiction with his less-studied more recent works, this analysis deploys, critiques and augments canonical theories of biopower in order to chart his generally growing disinclination to depict this resistance’s potential success. 2 This study thus works towards a new biopolitical literary criticism which argues that although the theories of Foucault and others illuminate the ways in which literature represents power and resistance in contemporary politics, narrative fiction indicates simultaneously the limitations of these theories and the practices of resistance they advocate. 3 Contents Acknowledgements 10 Introduction Salman Rushdie and Biopolitics 13 Biopolitical Literary Criticism 14 Rushdie’s Trajectory: From Pessoptimism to Pessimism 16 Towards a Biopolitical Reading of Rushdie 17 Approaches to Rushdie 17 Studying Biopolitics in the Twenty-First Century 20 Michel Foucault’s Political Philosophy (1): Sovereignty and Discipline 24 Michel Foucault’s Political Philosophy (2): Biopolitics 25 Michel Foucault’s Political Philosophy (3): Governmentality 28 Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Bare Life 30 Hardt and Negri, Roberto Esposito and the Spaces of Biopolitics 32 Resistance to Biopower in Rushdie’s Fiction: A Waning Potentiality 34 Chapter One – Biopolitics and Race Introduction: Biopolitics and Race 39 Michel Foucault: Society Must Be Defended 41 The Biopolitics of Race Beyond Foucault 43 The Legacy of Colonial Biopolitics 44 The Twentieth Century’s Multiple Racisms 47 Biopolitics and Racism in Midnight’s Children 51 4 White Equals Might: Phenotype in Midnight’s Children 52 Jawaharlal Nehru’s Pluralist Politics 57 The State Biopolitics of Sterilisation 59 Biopolitics and Racism in The Satanic Verses 66 Chamcha as Chamcha: Failed Assimilation among the New Racists 66 Racism, Immigration and the Construction of Difference 71 The Reclamation(?) of the Pejorative 75 Polizeiwissenschaft, Media and Racism 79 Biopolitics and Racism in The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury 85 The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1): Racism in the British Membrane 86 The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2): Transcending the Frontier of the Skin in America 88 Fury: The Persistence of Race-Thinking 92 Conclusion: Frontiers of Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics 100 Chapter Two – Thanatopolitics Introduction: Lingering Sovereignty 103 Thanatopolitics: A Potentiality within Biopolitics 104 Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer 108 Roberto Esposito: Immunitas 110 Thanatopolitics in Midnight’s Children and Shame 113 Thanatopolitics in Midnight’s Children: Military Interventions and Resistance in East Pakistan 114 Thanatopolitics in Shame: Raza Hyder’s War in the West 118 5 Thanatopolitics in Shalimar the Clown 123 Thanatopolitics of the Nazi Concentration Camp 124 Thanatopolitics and Hopelessness in Kashmir 126 Conclusion: The Growing Efficacy of Thanatopolitics 133 Chapter Three – Biopolitics and Space Introduction: Rushdie’s Relational Spaces 134 Theories of Biopower and Space 136 Giorgio Agamben’s Spatiality: Escaping the Camp 136 Michel Foucault: Heterotopias 138 Theories of Relational Space 140 Henri Lefebvre: Social Space 141 Deleuze and Guattari: Territorialisations 143 Margins of Oppression and Resistance in Midnight’s Children 145 The Impermeable National Border 147 The Striation of the Slums and the Terrors of Deterritorialised Space 149 Movement and Migration in The Satanic Verses 154 The Journey Out: Danger and Racialisation in the Act of Migration 155 The Journey Through: Heterotopian Illegibility and Failed Reterritorialisation 160 The Journey Back: Homecoming and a Possible Differential Space 163 Vertical and Horizontal Space in The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet 166 6 The Moor’s Last Sigh (1): The Vertical Territorialisations of Capital 168 The Moor’s Last Sigh (2): The Horizontal Territorialisations of Hindutva 172 The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1): The Great Goat Scam and Hindutva Capitalism 177 The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2): Movement and Migration, Again 180 Precarious Spaces in Shalimar the Clown: Three Kinds of Camp 184 Conclusion: The Cessation of Resistance 188 Chapter Four – Discourses of Resistance Introduction: Resistance in Rushdie 190 Power and Resistance in Foucault 192 The Later Foucault: Governmentality and Parrhēsia 193 Rushdie’s Pseudo-Parrhesiasts (1): Midnight’s Children and Saleem Sinai’s Narrative Resistance 197 The Untruthful Truth-Claims of Narrative 199 Narrative Dissemination and The Tastes of Saleem’s Audience 201 Rushdie’s Pseudo-Parrhesiasts (2): Resistance through the Creative Arts 205 Shame: State Suppression of Direct and Allegorical Artistic Discourses 206 The Moor’s Last Sigh (1): The (Non-)Dissemination of Moraes Zogoiby’s Narrative 211 The Moor’s Last Sigh (2): Aurora Zogoiby’s Art and The Erosion of Its Truth-Claim 213 7 Movements Inspired by Parrhēsia in The Ground Beneath Her Feet 218 Pseudo-Parrhēsia in Rai Merchant’s Photography 218 Bad Parrhēsia in Ormus Cama’s Lyrics 221 Good Parrhēsia in Vina Apsara’s Life and Death 224 Conclusion: From Discourses to Movements 226 Chapter Five – Movements of Resistance Introduction: Attenuated Resistance 228 Hardt and Negri: The Multitude 229 Roberto Esposito: Community/Communitas 231 Failed Communitas in Midnight’s Children 232 Saleem Sinai’s Pluralist Ideal and Jawaharlal Nehru’s Spatial Compromise 235 The Midnight Children’s Conference as Failed Multitude 238 A Possible Pluralist Future? 241 Failed Communitas in Shame 244 Sufiya Zinobia’s Resistance as Personal Vendetta 244 The Death of a Dictator and the Stillbirth of Communitas 248 Failed Communitas in Shalimar the Clown 250 Kashmiriyat: Mutable or Immutable? 251 Resistance through Terror (1): The JKLF 257 Fundamentalism vs. Kashmiriyat 261 Resistance through Terror (2): Shalimar Noman 264 Conclusion: Loss of Potentiality, Loss of Resistance 266 8 Conclusion 267 Endnotes 274 Bibliography 278 9 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their generous financial support for this project (and for my Master’s degree which provided the springboard to this level of postgraduate study), and the University of Exeter for assigning me one of their precious block grants. I hope that my work has proved commensurate with their expectation. Thanks to Simon James and Sam Thomas for their help in getting me to this point by providing the university’s English department with references I like to assume were mostly glowing, and to Gerald Maclean for supporting my PhD application by taking my project under his wing. Thanks also to all of the academics who helped me with my research proposal: Alex Murray, Alexandra Harris, Alison Light, Andrew Teverson, Anna Bernard, Brendan Nicholls, Corinne Fowler, Gail Low, Graham Huggan, James Procter, Lucienne Loh, Lucy Evans, Michelle