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Mass Media and Western Pop Culture POPULAR IMAGES AND COSMOPOLITAN MEDIATIONS: MASS MEDIA AND WESTERN POP CULTURE IN THE ANGLOPHONE SOUTH ASIAN NOVEL by ELIZABETH TARYN SIRKIN Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Kurt M. Koenigsberger Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May, 2007 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the dissertation of ______________________________________________________ candidate for the Ph.D. degree *. (signed)_______________________________________________ (chair of the committee) ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ (date) _______________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. DEDICATION For all of the doctoral candidates who are still hard at work on their dissertations and for my husband, Jeremy Richard Mason, who waited so patiently while I completed mine. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments.…………………………………………………………………… 3 Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….. 4 Chapter I: How Media Speak; What the Postcolonial Novel Says…………………… 6 Chapter II: “Written on the Brow of Some”: Inscription and Erasure in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide…………………………………………………………. 44 Chapter III: The Trivial, the Historically Significant, and the Ideologically Impoverished in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter………………… 70 Chapter IV: The Price of Western Media in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things…………………………………………………………………………. 108 Chapter V: “I am the Walrus”: Mass Media and the Struggle for Identity in The Buddha of Suburbia: A Conclusion……………………………………………………..147 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………185 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very grateful to my teachers and my friends, without whom this dissertation would never have evolved nor mattered. I am indebted to the members of my dissertation committee: Anne Helmreich, Judith Oster, and Gary Stonum, for their assistance, encouragement and instruction throughout my course of study at Case Western Reserve University and for their special involvement with the dissertation-writing process. A special thank you to my dissertation advisor, Kurt M. Koenigsberger, whose eye for detail consistently pushed me to be a stronger writer and a wiser scholar. I would also like to express my gratitude to the entire faculty of the English Department at Case Western Reserve University for encouraging me to work hard and for always being supportive and reassuring, especially Christopher Flint, who co-chaired the College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship, through which the ideas for this dissertation originally developed, and Thomas Bishop, who served on my dissertation committee until moving to Australia. I am, of course, beholden to all of the master’s and doctoral candidates I had the pleasure of working with and beside, for their humor, friendship and their belief in my ability to complete this project. There are simply too many to name. I must thank my entire family: my parents, Mary Lee and Louis Sirkin and Marilyn and Jonathan Mason, and my sisters and brothers, Tamar Sirkin and Jeffrey Luchs, Jennifer and Richard Meldman, Rachel and Benjamin Mendelsohn and Meredith Mason. I would not have maintained the stamina to finish without you, so thank you for loving me and nagging me throughout the past eight years. And, to my husband Jeremy, thank you for your kindness, your patience, your generosity and your unconditional, unwavering love. 3 Popular Images and Cosmopolitan Mediation: Mass Media and Western Pop Culture in the Anglophone South Asian Novel Abstract by Elizabeth Taryn Sirkin In this dissertation, I examine how R. K. Narayan, Bharati Mukherjee, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Arundhati Roy situate contemporary Euro-American popular culture within their novels to focus a spotlight on the neo-colonial strategies that still operate within the landscapes of Western media—print-based, televisiual, and celluloid. I also examine how these authors engage contemporary Western media from the perspective of Anglophone South Asian communities. What is distinctive about the novels that I discuss in this project is that they treat this cultural exchange in a critically cosmopolitan mode, one that balances the tension between celebrating its newness and warning about its potential resemblance to older forms of imperialism. That the postcolonial novels addressed in these pages engage with mass-mediated Western texts and images from a hybrid, cosmopolitan perspective is of great significance, because such a phenomenon works against what Rudyard Kipling, that towering figure of imperialist literature, famously wrote: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” (6). In contrast to Kipling’s lyric, the novels I examine in this dissertation do not suggest a simple convergence of East and West through a kind of mass-mediated confluence of images. 4 Rather, the authors researched and discussed within these pages—as a result of history, travel, and education—dissolve the boundaries between East and West. All of the texts discussed in this project are hybrid and intertextual. Their characters stand between two world and the texts themselves resonate with allusions to Western texts that have recognizable and sometimes rival meanings in the East and in the West. Each novelist refuses to represent the world in definitive terms, in which “East is East,” for example. The Anglophone novel in India, is, I argue, one significant agent of revision of received wisdom about South Asia’s relation to dominant English-language media from Britain and the U.S. In the course of their novelistic “revisions,” Narayan, Mukherjee, Rushdie, Roy, and Kureishi, each represent the world as impure and interrupted, at times complicated with uncertainty and tyranny, and at other times triumphantly full of hope and possibility. 5 How Western Media Speak; What the Postcolonial Novel Says How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (8-9) How does newness come into the world and how do we recognize it when it does? And, to the extent that Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses can be considered a “postcolonial” novel, how does the literature written out of the postcolonial condition invite us to engage this newness? How does the novel in particular—the genre through which Rushdie offers this meditation on newness—deal with the frustrations or betrayals that accompany fresh translations and conjoinings? In his book, Cosmopolitanism, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah casts off the label “postcolonialism” in favor of “cosmopolitanism”—an ideology that recognizes, he argues, that “People are different...and there is much to learn from our differences” (xv). Appiah uses the word conversation as a metaphor for the “engagement with the experiences and ideas of others” (5). In a discussion with Neal Conan on National Public Radio, Appiah explained that, “The key thing, if you’re going to be open to the world, is that you approach it in the spirit of assuming that you can learn from the world,” but he also cautioned that “Conversation is only worth doing if you are listening as well as talking.” Western media often purport to listen while they are talking. Though one of the 6 fundamental bonds amongst all human beings is our ability to tell and evaluate stories and though it is true that we learn from and change through these narratives, conversation cannot be one-sided. The suggestion made by critics of cultural imperialism such as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, David Spurr and Herbert Schiller that postcolonial bodies are simply empty vessels ready to be filled by popular media products and the images promoted by multinational corporations, as perpetuated by Western media, is deeply condescending. The novels discussed in this dissertation demonstrate that people respond to the influences of Western media in complex ways by reading Western popular cultural products and images in existing South Asian and cosmopolitan cultural contexts. In this project, I argue that what Rushdie refers to as “newness” comes into the world through the rapidity and reach of popular media products which are increasingly circulated about the globe. Western literature, journalism, popular music, television and cinema continue to reach new audiences. Furthermore, mediascapes—a term that Arjun Appadurai has coined to characterize the constantly shifting and contested spaces within which media flows are situated—are more than just thematic images in postcolonial literature; they permeate the language that postcolonial authors use. That the postcolonial novels addressed in these pages engage with mass-mediated Western texts and images from a hybrid, cosmopolitan perspective is of great significance, because such a phenomenon works against what Rudyard Kipling, that towering figure of imperialist literature, famously wrote: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” (6). In contrast to Kipling’s lyric, the novels I examine in this dissertation do
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