Cosmopolitan Disasters: from Bhopal to the Tsunami in South Asian Anglophone Literature

COSMOPOLITAN DISASTERS: FROM BHOPAL TO THE TSUNAMI IN SOUTH ASIAN ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE by Liam O'Loughlin B.A. in English, University of Maryland, College Park, 2008 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2015 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Liam O’Loughlin It was defended on April 6, 2015 and approved by Troy Boone, Associate Professor, English Neil Doshi, Assistant Professor, French and Italian Hannah Johnson, Associate Professor, English Neepa Majumdar, Associate Professor, English and Film Studies Dissertation Advisor: Shalini Puri, Associate Professor, English ii Copyright © by Liam O'Loughlin 2015 Portions of chapter one were published in “Negotiating Solidarity: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and the ‘NGO-ization’ of Postcolonial Narrative,” Comparative American Studies, 12.1-2 (2014): 101-13. A portion of chapter two was published in "Burnt Shadows," The Literary Encyclopedia, 2012. iii COSMOPOLITAN DISASTERS: FROM BHOPAL TO THE TSUNAMI IN SOUTH ASIAN ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE Liam O'Loughlin, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2015 This dissertation examines the representational conflict over sites of disaster in the contemporary period of neoliberal globalization. I name these disasters “cosmopolitan” not to assign value but to designate a set of political and representational problems that stem from each event’s position of global prominence. Interpreting Anglophone literatures of India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, I pair dominant modes of representation with particular disasters: humanitarian representations and the Union Carbide Bhopal gas leak; images of apocalypse that circulated after the 1998 nuclear tests in India and Pakistan; bureaucratic aesthetics and a set of coal mine collapses in 2001; and the wilderness aesthetics of the 2004 tsunami. South Asian disaster writing engages, disrupts, and reworks these dominant modes by redirecting disaster imaginations away from moments of sensational violence towards recurrent forms of structural violence. These narratives challenge the reductive notions of “natural disaster” and “accident” by treating disasters not as moments of rupture but as moments within a longer historical continuum, thus confronting the global media’s routine stigmatization of the Global South as an ahistorical disaster zone, or what I refer to as the disaster exotic. Moreover, these narratives explore the subtle possibilities of emergent communities of reconstruction, attending to disaster solidarities at the local and transnational levels. Bringing together conversations in trauma and memory studies, ecocriticism and media studies, as well as globalization theory and the sociology of disaster, I contend that South Asian narratives both critique dominant disaster discourses and excavate utopian imaginations from the detritus of the aftermath. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ....................................................................................................... VIII 1.0 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 THE DISASTERS OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES .............................................. 4 1.2 DISASTROUS COSMOPOLITANISMS AND COSMOPOLITAN DISASTERS ...................................................................... 7 1.3 DEFINING DISASTER: STAKES AND CONTEXTS .......................................... 15 1.4 PERIODIZING THE MODERN DISASTER ......................................................... 20 1.5 NEOLIBERAL IMAGINATIONS OF DISASTER ............................................... 27 1.6 SHIFTING THE FRAME ......................................................................................... 35 2.0 DISASTER SOLIDARITY AND THE “NGO-IZATION” OF POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVE ..................................................................................... 46 2.1 REPRESENTATIONS OF THE AID WORKER AND THE BUREAUCRATIC IMAGINATION .............................................................. 52 2.2 “NGO-IZATION”: THE NGO AS AUTHOR AND ANTHOLOGIST ................ 58 2.3 ANIMAL’S PEOPLE: REVISING THE NGO NARRATIVE ............................... 63 2.4 THE ARRIVAL OF THE AID WORKER AND NEGOTIATED ALLIANCES .................................................................................. 75 2.5 COMMUNITY IMMERSION AND INCORPORATION .................................... 79 v 2.6 “PLEASE DON’T JUST TURN THE PAGE” ........................................................ 81 3.0 SMOLDERING AND SCARS: ALTERNATIVE IMAGINATIONS OF SOUTH ASIAN NUCLEAR DISASTER .................................................................. 84 3.1 SOUTH ASIAN TRAJECTORIES OF NUCLEAR NATIONALISM ................. 88 3.2 WHITE HILLS AND SMOKE SIGNALS: SOUTH ASIAN NUCLEAR IMAGINATIONS ..................................................... 95 3.3 BURNT SHADOWS: THE NUCLEAR IMAGINATION IN THE WAR ON TERROR .................................................................................. 110 3.4 BIRDS OF COMPARISON AND THE DISCOURSE OF NECESSITY .......... 112 3.5 THE KAMIKAZE AND MUJAHEDEEN: SELF-SACRIFICIAL MILITARISMS ................................................................. 119 3.6 NEW YORK AND NAGASAKI: SECURITY AND DISASTER ....................... 121 4.0 CRISIS CONTAINED: THE POETICS OF BUREAUCRATIC DISASTER ........... 125 4.1 HISTORIES OF THE BUREAUCRATIC STATE .............................................. 128 4.2 ADMINISTERING DISASTER: STRUCTURAL AND SENSATIONAL VIOLENCE .......................................... 132 4.3 BUREAUCRATIC STYLE AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE INDIAN STATE ....................................................................................................................... 136 4.4 THE SOUND OF WATER: DISASTER’S BUREAUCRATIC BURIAL ........... 145 4.5 MAMMARIES OF THE WELFARE STATE: THE ROUTINIZATION OF DISASTER ............................................................. 152 5.0 THE WILD WAVES: REPRESENTING NATURAL DISASTER IN POST-TSUNAMI LITERATURE ........................................................ 160 vi 5.1 “HAS THE WAVE LOST ITS BEAUTY?”: WILDERNESS AND NATURAL DISASTER ...................................................... 165 5.2 WAVE: A SURVIVOR’S WILDERNESS MEMOIR ........................................... 173 5.3 THE WILDERNESS POETICS OF GRIEF ......................................................... 178 5.4 THE KILLING WATERS ...................................................................................... 186 5.5 “A FLUID NARRATIVE” ...................................................................................... 193 6.0 EPILOGUE: DISPOSABLE DISASTERS AND LITERATURE’S LONG MEMORY ............................................................................. 199 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................... 204 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I thank my wonderful committee—Shalini Puri, Troy Boone, Neil Doshi, Hannah Johnson, and Neepa Majumdar—for their patience, care, and commitment to this project. Thank you to Troy, whose seminar on Victorian literature and empire and trenchant commentary provided exemplary and influential models of close reading. Thank you to Neil, whose enthusiasm, scholarly breadth, and valuable mentorship strengthened this work. Thank you to Hannah, who helped me to think through parts of this work at an early stage, and to identify its application to fields and periods outside my own. Thank you to Neepa, whose seminar on Indian cinema profoundly helped me to provincialize literature, and whose feedback pushed me to think in constellational terms. This project owes its genesis and evolution to the guidance of Shalini, who was an invaluable teacher, mentor, reader, critic, and supporter at every stage of my training. She taught me to avoid orthodoxy at every turn and challenged and refined my thinking on aesthetics and politics. I thank Shalini not only for her dedication to this project, but for her example of engaged scholarship, rooted intellectual activity, and sentences that exceed the utilitarian demands of academic argument. Other Pitt faculty members have had both subtle and significant impacts upon my thinking, writing, and teaching, including Susan Andrade, Jonathan Arac, Tyler Bickford, Nick Coles, Jane Feuer, Nancy Glazener, Geoff Glover, Cory Holding, Imani Owens, Lara Putnam, viii Bill Scott, Jen Waldron, and Autumn Womack. I also thank Anthony Carrigan for his generous correspondence. Looking back, it’s clear that I owe my disciplinary belonging in Postcolonial Studies to the vibrant left-wing student activism at the University of Maryland and the mentorship of Sangeeta Ray. I’m grateful to the University of Pittsburgh and the English Department for their institutional support during the writing of this project. A Tobias Fellowship provided a valuable year for reading and writing. A Dissertation Research Travel grant enabled my research in New Delhi, an experience that especially underlies chapters two and three, as well as my broader orientation towards contemporary South Asian writing. Grants from the Indo-Pacific Council and the English Department Research and Development fund provided me the opportunity to share ideas with scholars in Vancouver, Canada and Leeds, U.K. I’m incredibly

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