The University of Chicago States of Complaint
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO STATES OF COMPLAINT: DISSATISFIED CITIZENSHIP, ENVIRONMENTAL HARM, AND THE DEMAND FOR WELFARE IN GLOBAL SOUTH LITERATURE, 1956-2017 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY REBECCA SOHEE OH CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2018 Table of Contents List of Figures iii Acknowledgements iv Dissertation Abstract vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Adjudicating Interests: Oil Revenue and Pollution in Nigerian Legislation and Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah 44 Chapter 2: The Claims of Bodies: Practices of Citizenship After Bhopal in Survivor Testimony and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People 92 Chapter 3: Middle Class Reform/Reforming the Middle Classes: Development in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living 132 Chapter 4: Ordinary and Extra-ordinary States: Toward Pacific Futures in Pacific Island Legislation, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hulme’s Stonefish 167 Bibliography 222 ii List of Figures 1. Photograph from Te Kaniva: Tuvalu Climate Change Policy 2012. Page 181. iii Acknowledgements There are many people who deserve thanks for this project. Firstly, my dissertation committee. Benjamin Morgan always encouraged me to be confident in my own scholarly voice, even when I wasn’t sure of what I wanted to say. Christopher Taylor pushed me to greater conceptual precision and to think of my arguments as fine-grained strategic interventions with other scholars and my fields. And Sonali Thakkar, who has been a committed mentor from my first year of graduate school, has helped me to think deeply about my argumentative stakes and to situate myself in wider conversations. The project owes much to their generous and attentive reading, and it would not have become what it is without their consistent support, feedback, and encouragement. The dissertation has also benefitted immensely from other faculty and students at the University of Chicago. In particular, it owes much to the members of the Climate Change: Interdisciplinary Challenges to the Humanities and Social Sciences Reading Group, which provided a stimulating environment for thinking about problems in the background of this project. Dipesh Chakrabarty and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson were generous interlocutors in its very earliest and most inchoate stages. I am also indebted to many outside the University of Chicago. Greg Garrard, Astrida Neimanis, and Sunila Kale have all offered professional support and critical feedback on versions of the first two chapters, and a special thanks goes to the Global South/Postcolonial Workshop, who offered valuable insights about the last chapter and have provided an incredibly enthusiastic and warm community. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Teresa Shewry generously responded to queries from a stranger, and their feedback has informed my last chapter. My graduate student colleagues have been an endlessly valuable resource. Thanks to iv Rachel Kyne, Kevin Kimura, Brady Smith, and Chandani Patel for imparting their wisdom at various stages of this graduate school journey; and thanks to Mollie Mcfee, Allison Turner, Sarah Kunjummen, Samuel Rowe, and Katharine Mershon for being invigorating interlocutors as well as dear friends. I would never have weathered the storm of these challenging years without their perspective, warmth, and companionship. Thanks to Annie Heffernan, who helped me find another intellectual home at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Wolverines writing group for teaching me to set reasonable goals, and Joya John; I look forward to crossing paths as we both pursue our ecocritical interests. Janet Zong has been a great companion from afar, offering endless cheer and a comparative perspective on the field. Thank you also to my dearest friend Kira Allmann, for whom neither time nor distance has mattered, and who reminds me that there’s intellectually interesting life outside academia. My interest in literary research and my commitment to thinking of literature as robust social theorizing began at the University of Virginia. I study postcolonial literature largely because of Vicki Olwell. I also owe great thanks to Michael Levenson, who guided my first clumsy attempts at independent research, Rita Felski, who laid my intellectual foundations in critical theory, and Peter Capuano, without whom I would never have had the courage to go to graduate school at all. I am also grateful to my parents, Kelly and Charles. You have always pushed me to be endlessly ambitious and have always believed in me. Thank you for cultivating my love of reading, and for your love and support, even if you haven’t always understood my writing. To my siblings Diana and Eddie, thank you for keeping me grounded and for remembering all our old jokes. I am so grateful for you and so glad we have grown closer as we’ve grown older. Thanks also to my parents-in-law Janice and Bruce, who have provided a calming second home. v Finally, my deepest thanks are due to Charles. I cannot imagine having gone through any of this without you. Your optimism, humor, and belief in me have kept me anchored and have been my light in the worst of times. Your love and support mean the world. vi Dissertation Abstract This dissertation is a literary and cultural study of how environmental harm has shaped political life in the global South since the 1950s. It argues against anti-statist orthodoxies in postcolonial literary studies, ecocriticsm, and academia at large to make a recuperative case for the welfare state in the lives of the global poor. The project argues that environmental harms have prompted the poor into agonistic relation with the failures of state welfare and that environmental harm has therefore been central to practices of postcolonial citizenship, the development of the postcolonial interventionist state, and the meanings of welfare to which this form of the state is committed. Through a heuristic called dissatisfied citizenship, this dissertation studies how the welfare state is revised and negotiated in India, Nigeria, and the Pacific. I argue that discourses of environmental complaint index popular expectations and desires for better forms of governance in the guise of cataloguing political failures. I find that in doing so these discourses remake a variety of hegemonic political norms to imagine versions of the state that respond more properly to harm. Each of my chapters shows how a different political ideal like national interests, futurity, welfare, and development, while not originally conceived of as addressing environmental harms, is mobilized and amended into a platform for environmental claim- making. By considering the work of global Anglophone novelists and poets like Chinua Achebe, Indra Sinha, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, and Amitav Ghosh alongside popular declarations, juridical cases, and state policies, I reveal how they make up a shared world of political poesis within the discursive archive of particular environmental harms. Chapter one begins by exploring the multiplicity of political ideals attached to oil imaginaries in Nigeria. I contrast a minor strain of concern with oil pollution in national vii legislation and Chinua Achebe’s critique of the violence of resource control in Anthills of the Savannah with dominant conceptions of oil as revenue. I argue that while the view of oil as revenue encourages competition within Nigeria’s federal structure, the former concerns generate alternative political ideals of inclusive community and recognition of enmeshed local and national needs. The second chapter moves from pollution to poison. This chapter compares the testimony of survivors of the Bhopal gas explosion (December 2-3, 1984), widely considered the worst industrial disaster in modern history, legislation surrounding the explosion’s settlement, and Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People. I argue that survivor testimonies evoke bodily pain in order to claim foregone promises of government welfare. I then examine Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People which, I argue, posits that post-disaster terms of political relation must arise from the citizenry as they articulate the unpredictable materiality of their toxified bodies. Chapter three focuses on the place of middle class reform vis-à-vis state development and the history of community based organizations (CBOs) as precedents to the anti-poor bias that has characterized Indian development discourses in the post-1980s. I consider how Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide pose middle class interests as an obstacle to but also a potential source of reform for state priorities that discount the needs of rural populations. The final chapter addresses the threat sea level rise posts to Pacific statehoods and futurity; it considers how national plans for climate adaptation and literary texts like Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok (2017) and Keri Hulme’s Stonefish (2004) imagine both ordinary and extraordinary futures in order to contest the determinism of climate refugeeism. viii Introduction I. Environmental Harm: Political Failure and Dissatisfied Citizenship That environmental harm is a global phenomenon no one will dispute. Toxicity, pollution, nuclear radiation, severe storms, flood damage, desertification, and drought cross North and South divides, respecting neither geopolitical privilege nor national borders. Environmentalism the world over has been called “a response to the failure