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HALEY-DISSERTATION-2016.Pdf (3.385Mb) INDIAN OCEAN LITERATURE IN THE SHADE OF BANDUNG by Joseph Haley A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland August 12, 2016 © 2016 Joseph Haley All Rights Reserved Abstract “Indian Ocean Literature in the Shade of Bandung” examines novels, plays, and nonfiction by contemporary writers from the Indian Ocean rim and its diaspora who have a strong interest in the effects of neoliberal economic policies upon the postcolonial nation-state. Focusing upon the contemporary Anglophone literatures of India and Malaysia, I locate middle-class skepticism regarding the feasibility—or even desirability—of constructing a postcolonial national imaginary that would be founded upon the politics of decolonization. At the same time, I find that important contemporary writers–Tan Twan Eng, Huzir Sulaiman, Arundhati Roy, and Aravind Adiga—express a marked ambivalence toward the rapid globalization of their national homelands; they critique the growth of a transnational consumerism with political, material, and cultural ties to the west. Highlighting connections between the mediation of a literary marketplace and the cultural production of a comprador bourgeoisie, I argue, enables each of these authors to stage a double critique of neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism—the latter of which may feed upon discontent sown by neoliberal policies among the region’s most economically underdeveloped communities. Furthermore, each of these literary representations gestures toward a regional transnationalism that is oriented around the ideal geographies of the maritime Indian Ocean, which utopian inflection I trace to the Afro-Asian Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. I therefore place this contemporary writing into conversation with that of literary precursors—including Abdullah Hussein, Anita Desai, and Salman Rushdie— who were more immediately concerned with the legacy of Third World Internationalism. ii In each case, I have been interested to know how works of contemporary fiction seek to capture the spirit of regional cooperation that marked Bandung, and how they employ it in the service of utopian imagination and ideology critique. Situating contemporary literature in relation to this earlier moment helps me to clarify role that Bandung continues to play in mediating a literary marketplace and local reading culture that are marked by the seductions and anxieties of global consumer culture. I conclude that these writers stage a recuperation of Bandung internationalism in an attempt to imagine a global middle-class—one that would be capable of enjoying the fruits of neoliberal economic development, while resisting the forms of political complicity that have historically marked the comprador bourgeoisie. Director: Douglas Mao. Second Reader: Jeanne-Marie Jackson iii Acknowledgements I offer my profound gratitude to Douglas Mao, whose grace and critical acumen continue to astonish me with our every interaction. Likewise, I owe a great deal to the sage advice of Mark Thompson and Jeanne-Marie Jackson, who have kindly helped me to navigate unfamiliar disciplinary waters as I researched this dissertation. Because the Johns Hopkins Department of English offers a deeply collegial environment, moreover, there are a number of scholars whose teaching and precedent underpin my hold on literature in fundamental ways: to Amanda Anderson, Frances Ferguson, and Simon During, I owe the moral urgency of cultural and social theory; to Richard Halpern, the art of asking good questions; to Sharon Achinstein and Andew Miller, exempla of professional comportment; to Jared Hickman and Eric Sundquist, the import of archival mastery; to Isobel Armstrong and Jonathan Dollimore, the necessity of communal reading practices; to Mary Favret, a conviction that less ostentation reflects greater insight; to Drew Daniel, permission to admit the wisdom of lived culture; to Jesse Rosenthal, an appreciation for the social work performed by novels; to Christopher Nealon, a realization that knowledge—and therefore interventions in its production— must be articulated within specific institutional contexts; and to Sharon Cameron, the practical lesson that effortless lucidity belies the diligence of painstaking scholarship. In addition, I am grateful to Noor Hashem (along with the delightful John Robbins) for deepening my understanding of global issues faced by contemporary Muslims (not to mention academics more generally). Finally, thanks belong to Sally Hauf and Tracy Glick for their patience and encouragement in helping me to prepare this manuscript. Without exception, the distinctive fusion of rigor and generosity at Hopkins has provided me with a continual intellectual awakening. Within the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, the impact that Pat Kain and Will Evans have had on the graduate teaching community, myself very much included, simply cannot be overstated. Their pedagogical lessons in the craft of teaching exposition have strengthened my own writing practice. More important, they have built a programmatic legacy of high expectations and unflagging support that—semester after semester— continues to transform Hopkins undergraduates into discursive young scholars. To this end, I also thank Anne-Elizabeth Brodsky and Marisa O’Connor for specific guidance. I remain humbled by the work of my fellow graduate colleagues. For their direct influence on my conception of this project, I owe special mention to Sungmey Lee, Samreen Kazmi, Hitomi Koyama, William Miller, Gabrielle Ponce, Kevin Roberts, and Christopher Westcott. For models of scholarly engagement, I could ask for none better than Robert Day, Patrick Fessenbecker, Matt Flaherty, David and Stephanie Hershinow, Roger Maioli, Grant Shreve, Andrew Sisson, Tony Wexler, Mande Zecca, and Nan Zhang. But for inspiration and camaraderie, I owe too many companions to name. I am grateful to the scholars of the Modern Language Association’s Malaysia- Singapore working group for welcoming me into their lively academic community. Special thanks to Sheela Jane Menon for organizing our special session, “Malaysia: Mediating Literature, Culture, and the State,” at MLA 2016; to Snehal Shingavi for serving as discussant on a panel where I presented a kernel of my Huzir argument; and to Fiona Lee, Weihsin Gui, Cheryl Naruse, Joanne Leow, Brian Bernards, Eng Kiong Tan, iv Ma Shao-Ling, May Ee Wong, Jacqulyn Teoh, and Philip Holden for their constructive feedback. My intellectual trajectory would look nothing like it does without the experience of having lived and worked alongside remarkable colleagues in Terengganu, Malaysia. For this opportunity I thank the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the Malaysian-American Commission on Educational Exchange, and the staff and students of Imtiaz Dungun and SMK Tengku Intan Zaharah—Saya bertuah kerana menjadi “cik gu” anda. Dan ke Fulbright kawan-kawan: jangan menukar. Eckerd College was a truly miraculous place to discover the joys of literary scholarship. For teaching me how to read humanely, I will be forever grateful to Jewel Spears Brooker, Jared Stark, D. Scott Ward, Carolyn Johnston, Sterling Watson, Dennis Lehane, and Elie Wiesel. For introducing me to fieldwork, I owe the incomparable and fearless Nancy Janus. Thanks also to Jared and Carolyn for their feedback on a talk that I delivered at the SCLA annual conference in 2015, which became my Tan chapter. Finally, there would be nothing worth saying without the patience and support of my friends and family in Baltimore and around the world—especially Jason Hornsby and Jacob Elias (for hosting during research), Zoe Friedman (for translating beauty), Katie Hamblin (for saving my hand), Nasim Chatha (for reading my praxis); and above all, Rod, Vivien, Michelle, Paul, Matt, and Seth (for unconditional love). v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Indian Ocean Fiction in the Shade of Bandung Chapter One: 34 Malaysian Historical Memory in the Novels of Tan Twan Eng Chapter Two: New Malaysian Voices: Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Huzir Sulaiman 79 Chapter Three: Comprador Dissatisfaction: Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie 126 Chapter Four: Inter-Caste Violence: Arundhati Roy and Aravind Adiga 156 Works Cited 204 Curriculum Vitae 210 vi Introduction: Indian Ocean Fiction in the Shade of Bandung This dissertation undertakes a comparative reading of global cosmopolitan middle-class writers from India and Malaysia who are engaged in an aesthetic-moral project of cosmopolitanism from below. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to scholarly discussion of the mediating role that Anglophone world literature plays in exposing global audiences to a post-Bandung political imagination. The writers on whom it focuses most centrally — Huzir Sulaiman, Tan Twan Eng, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Aravind Adiga, and Arundhati Roy — each have a complex relationship to a national homeland (Malaysia in the case of the first three, India in the latter) that may be described as a tension between cosmopolitan rejection of official nationalism and a melancholic desire for national belonging. In this context, my use of the terms “nation” and “nationalism” is by design somewhat indefinite, because I mean for it to designate a pliable imaginative formation in contradistinction to the (apparently) intractable forms of state power. Each of the readings below demonstrates how formal features of a literary text (fragmentation, repetition, allegorization, allusion, stream-of-consciousness, polyvocality,
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