Postcolonial Literatures on Genocide and Capital Shashi Thandra Wayne State University

Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2014 Annihilation And Accumulation: Postcolonial Literatures On Genocide And Capital Shashi Thandra Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Thandra, Shashi, "Annihilation And Accumulation: Postcolonial Literatures On Genocide And Capital" (2014). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 1103. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. ANNIHILATION AND ACCUMULATION: POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES OF GENOCIDE AND CAPITAL by SHASHIDAR RAO THANDRA DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2014 MAJOR: ENGLISH Approved by: ______________________________ Advisor Date ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ! DEDICATION For my wife, who saw in me a different narrative ii!! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank, first and foremost, my wife Dr. Sophia C.E. Frese. Her support and belief in me prevailed over the darkest winters. I am grateful to my brother for his encouragement and the stream of small luxuries that allowed me to experience something other than dearth. To my parents, I have always appreciated your concerns. I am obliged to Robert Aguirre, Barrett Watten, Steve Shaviro and Bruce Robbins for a tremendous education and patient guidance. You have helped me stay grounded, allowed me room to explore, and demonstrated what an ongoing engagement with the world looks like. I am a better person for having studied with you. I feel fortunate for the incredible friends I met during graduate school, especially Kristine F. Danielson. No idea felt right until it survived your challenges and no one received ideas more openly than you. I would be remiss without thanking Michael Schmidt, Justin Prystash, Sarah Ruddy, Joel Levise, and Ryan Dillaha, who showed me how to argue intensely without animosity. To the Wayne State University community of students with whom I shared the classroom as a student and teacher: through lives that balanced family, full time jobs, and a full time university schedule of classes, you taught me what it means to persevere through the bleak realities of deindustrialization and austerity policies; that the effortful and active process of education is worth fighting for; that a university campus is both a safe haven and a battle ground for transforming lives . iii! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION!.............................................................................................................................................!ii! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS!..........................................................................................................................!iii! Introduction!............................................................................................................................................!1! Chapter 1: The Midnight’s Children of Bangladesh!....................................................................!18! Chapter 2: Against Indifference: International Weapons And Narratives In Rwanda!.......!39! Chapter 3: Accumulating Safety: Asian Shylocks and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall !..................................................................................................................................................................!60! Chapter 4: 'The door was always open': Caste and Neoliberalism in The White Tiger!.....!107! Conclusion!..........................................................................................................................................!136! APPENDIX A: ENDNOTES.............................................................................................................141 REFERENCES!.......................................................................................................................................!155 ABSTRACT!............................................................................................................................................!165! AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT!...................................................................................................!167! iv! ! 1 Introduction Recent debates about the continued relevance of postcolonial studies stake three broad positions. In the first, Robert Young argues that postcolonial studies are born of and continually engaged with anticolonial political struggle. Simon During represents the second argument, which holds that Young's version of postcolonialism caricatures the fragmented and contradictory reality of colonialism, which "moved forward fitfully" and varied from violent expropriation to "acts of exchange and mutual benefit," rarely evincing the kind of "clear decisionism" anticolonial movements necessarily attribute to them (335-36). Moreover, During argues, the age of formal empires has passed, so a paradigm built on those moorings must necessarily be swept away. Dipesh Chakrabarty articulates a third set of arguments, less in defense of postcolonial studies than as a broad outline of their current tasks in the context of anthropogenic climate change. The author of Provincializing Europe writes that thinking human agency in the current moment requires analysis across “multiple and incommensurable scales at once,” a strength of postcolonial studies generally and its literary branch specifically (1). The first level is the universal human subject bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, the human that is potentially the same across spaces and times, the subject of human rights. The second level of human agency sits adjacent to the first but acknowledges the contingencies of history, race, class and gender that overdetermine the rights-bearing subject. The third level analyzes humans as a parasitic collective who have created a geological age, the Anthropocene, which has altered the climate in ways that endanger their planetary habitat. Chakrabarty is careful to say that no one of these views “is rendered invalid by the presence of others. They are simply disjunctive” (2). In fact, ! 2 any effort to conceptualize the world today "encounters the necessity of thinking disjunctively about the human, through moves that in their simultaneity appear contradictory" (2). Postcolonial literature works across several of these disjunctures. The archive I assemble in this dissertation take seriously the universal rights-bearing human as well as the historical circumstances such as genocides and systemic discrimination that obviate such universality. In so doing, these texts bring together Chakrabarty's discontinuous modes of agency into rich palimpsests that never quite cohere. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Boubecar Boris Diop’s Murambi, The Book of Bones (2000), the subject of my first two chapters, concern genocides in Bangladesh and Rwanda respectively. In chapters 3 and 4 I take up M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger to analyze the weird arguments offered by protagonists who claim that capitalist entrepreneurship and its attendant accumulation constitute a mode of self-defense against the contingencies of racist states. While Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Diop’s Murambi concern genocides that differ across time and place, both novels share a concern with the overdetermination of Southern conflicts by Northern weapons and geopolitical strategies. Written during the Cold War, Rushdie’s novel examines the consequences of that Great Power showdown for the subcontinent. Specifically, the novel locates in this larger global arena the 1971 war of independence waged in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and the genocidal repression meted out by (West) Pakistan. America and Europe supply weapons and political support to Pakistan while the Soviet Union sides with Bangladesh and India’s intervention into that crisis. The 1994 Rwandan genocide, the subject of Diop’s novel, similarly attends to the international forces abetting the genocidaires and aiding their victims. France, which supplied Pakistan with fighter jets in 1971, provides weapons and diplomatic support for the murderous Hutu Power militias while also taking the lead in the ! 3 ostensibly humanitarian Operation Turquoise. Rushdie’s novel, I argue, asks what it means to indict individual perpetrators given the international weapons and geopolitics that enabled their crimes. In contrast, Diop’s novel critiques the narrative of global “indifference”—no one cared about Rwanda—repeated across analyses of the genocide. Murambi, in my reading, foregrounds the over investment of European powers, France and Belgium specifically, which belies their ostensible apathy. M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger continues the focus on the influence of global machinations on local conflicts. These novels, however, allow me to turn away from Northern powers to emergent Southern powers and their dominations of other Southern spaces. Although these novels focus on East Africa and India respectively, they concern Southern businessmen negotiating structural discrimination in their countries by leveraging the influx of

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