UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Debt Sentences: The Poetics and Politics of Credit Culture in India, Italy, and the Inland Empire, 1930-Present Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1jc4j29c Author Rawal, Tanya Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Debt Sentences: The Poetics and Politics of Credit Culture in India, Italy, and the Inland Empire, 1930-Present A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Tanya Rawal August 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Marguerite Waller, Co-Chairperson Dr. John N. Kim, Co-Chairperson Dr. Tabassum ‘Ruhi’ Khan Dr. Mariam Lam Copyright by Tanya Rawal 2015 The Dissertation of Tanya Rawal is approved: Committee Co-Chairperson Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements Words can never explain how grateful I am to have had the opportunity to be a student of Dr. Marguerite Waller. Dr. Waller has been a major influence in my research since my second year of college; the path from Italian cinema to human rights and globalization is a windy course, but it is nothing short of exciting with a trailblazer like Dr. Waller to pave the way. It is with her kindness and patience that I have been able to complete my dissertation. And I can only hope that the arguments and logic that I have introduced in my scholarship can attest to her intellectual guidance and support. Dr. Waller gave me the tools to challenge normative frameworks and my co-chair, Dr. John N. Kim ensured that I had the space to put those tools to the test. Dr. Kim’s faith in my abilities gave me the motivation to meditate deeper into the abstract worlds of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Michel Foucault. And these spaces that I once found intimidating are like home to me now. Mindful of my project, Dr. Kim generously supplied me with the mentorship I needed to keep alive my intellectual curiosity. The hundreds of cups of tea that I have shared with Dr. Tabassum ‘Ruhi' Khan have been a constant source of insight and knowledge for me. With conversations about everything from postfeminism to the architecture of Old Delhi, Dr. Khan gave me friendship and the momentum to continue my research. Aside from Dr. Khan I do not know many people that can understand what it means to be so far away from Delhi, the iv one place I consider to be home. I am indebted to Dr. Khan for always making sure that I come back to my roots in my everyday life and in my academic pursuits. I attribute much of my focus on the global south to Dr. Mariam B. Lam. When she caught me veering away from the global south, Dr. Lam would always bring me back to this complicated space. Her guidance comes with friendship and her honesty comes with support. It is with her instruction and leadership that I began to understand the art of becoming a ‘comparatist.’ I am also thankful for guidance and support of Dr. Sabine Doran, Dr. Geoff Cohen, Dr. Pasquale Verdicchio, and Dr. David Glidden. I am especially grateful for the strong foundation provided to me by Dr. Robin Roberts, Dr. Brannon Costello, Dr. Ed White, and Dr. Kevin Bongiorni. I am forever indebted to my colleagues and comrades: Kristin Nicole Harper, Richard Hunt, Adanna Jones, Susannah Copi, and Gavin Arnall,. Thank you all for support over these last several years. I consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to reflect, meditate, brainstorm, and write with each of you. You all are my teachers. Sudha Rani Jindia and Dr. Jaswant Rai Jindia, thank you both for showing me the world and entertaining my curiosities. v This dissertation is dedicated to each student I have had the opportunity to work with at University of California, Riverside and University of Delhi. I am forever indebted to each of you. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Debt Sentences: The Poetics and Politics of Credit Culture in India, Italy, and the Inland Empire, 1930-Present by Tanya Rawal Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, August 2015 Dr. Marguerite Waller, Co-Chairperson, Dr. John N. Kim, Co-Chairperson Through the cultural lens of California’s Inland Empire, India, and Italy, this dissertation explores how creditor-debtor relationships translate into literature, film, media, and space. Raising key questions about the moral and monetary values that shape creditor- debtor relationships, I discuss in detail the histories and processes that shape and inform both creditors and debtors. I argue that from the emphasis on the debtor’s guilt and punishment in previous scholarly investigations of the creditor-debtor relationship, debtors have taken on the burden of unethical credit schemes manufactured on behalf of the free market’s health. Divided into five chapters, this project addresses different aspects of the creditor-debtor relationship. With an analysis of student debt the preface and the introduction illustrate how the creditor-debtor relationship is shaped by the sovereignty of the economy such that the health of the economy becomes more significant than the well-being of people and the environment. The introduction also vii exposes the creditor’s fear of the potential capitalist and the limitations that the industrial- complex imposes on the creditor-debtor relationship. ‘Geographies of Debt’ focuses on California’s prison industrial complex in order to examine how the capitalist’s debt that develops from surplus-value is negated through prison labor and the southern trope. “Dancing to Debt” investigates how Bollywood’s investment in making Pakistanis the guilty and punishable subject has developed alongside various modes of accumulation by dispossession that seemingly favor a Hindu nationalist political agenda, but have, in turn, made all brown bodies vulnerable to the terrorist trope and the military industrial complex. “Protesting Moral Debt” illustrates how the farmer suicides that have plagued India’s agrarian community for the last two decades are indicative of their moral debts to the land, the perennial creditor, and not, as popular media suggests, their monetary debts to various moneylenders, which debunks the authority of market fundamentalist discourse. Lastly, through an analysis of Italian neorealist cinema, “The Pleasure of Debt” reveals the effects of the pleasure creditor’s take in imposing suffering on the debtor and, likewise, the pleasure poor communities take in witnessing the decadence of elite culture. viii Table of Contents List of Figures. .xi Preface. xii Love and Debt: An Aphorism. xii Education Should Not Be A Debt Sentence. .xiii Introduction. .1 Poor Little Rich Creditor. .9 Credit Culture. .14 Chapter 1 Geographies of Debt: The Global South and the Prison Industrial Complex . .19 A Geography of Debt and the Promise of the Global South. 22 Navigating the Geography of Debt. 26 Evading Moral Debt: Developing the Prison Industrial Complex Alternative. 31 Resisting the Southern Trope. .36 Chapter 2 Dancing to Debt: . .42 What Nation-State is Bollywood Singing?. 42 Choreographing Theft. 51 20 YouTube Videos and Bollywood Thievery. .55 Neoliberal Technoculture Wars: Bollywood’s Production of the Terrorist Trope. .. 65 The Mumbai Attacks. 65 Total Siyappa/Chaos. 68 The Non-Moral Sense of Technology and Freedom. 75 Yash Chopra’s Veer-Zaara (2004): Producing Pakistan and the Bad Conscience in Bollywood. 81 Bollywood at the Wagah Border. 90 Chapter 3 Subjectivities of Debt. .97 The Trope of the Noble Farmer in the Cultural Economy of Indian Neoliberalism. .106 Premchand’s Godaan and the Protesting Farmer. .111 Dhaniya and the Real: Farmer Suicides and the Vulgarity of Protest . .121 ix Chapter 4 The Pleasure of Debt: Encoding/Decoding Italian Neorealist Cinema from Social Critique to Poverty Porn . .129 A Brief History of Neorealism. .133 The Origin of the Proletariat Gaze. .136 The Development of Poverty Porn. 143 When the Subaltern Laughs: A New Contrapasso. 145 Bibliography. .148-160 x List of Figures Figure 1:Hori Mahato’s Skeletal Foot, from Rizvi’s Peepli Live (2010). 122 Figure 2: Remembering Hori Mahato, from Rizvi’s Peepli Live (2010). .. 124 xi Preface LOVE AND DEBT: AN APHORISM When we love someone we give them everything: our souls, our bodies, our mind. On the surface it might look like we simply give away our time and money. But only those of us that have ever endured the burden of being in love can know the value of each moment and every smile. For this reason, perhaps all love is unrequited since even if a beloved returns your love it can never be equally compensated. Only the admirer, the one in love, can know what is given and, for that matter, what is taken when they love. To love is to become both the creditor and debtor. Is a beloved ever indebted to their admirer? What is the beloved guilty of when he or she accepts the energies of their admirer? No punishment — no amount of accrued debt — can ever force the beloved to fall in love with their admirer. The misfortune of unrequited love lends itself best to understanding the creditor-debtor relationship that drives neoliberalism. Love, in itself, might be more comparable to debt. But in the case of unrequited love, if the admirer, like the creditor, gives an excess of love to a person who can never reciprocate that affection then it is the responsibility of the admirer, not the beloved, to stop giving. xii EDUCATION SHOULD NOT BE A DEBT SENTENCE One of the major challenges that we face as educators is the rising debt of our students.