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UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Nowhere If Not Here : the ethics of queer experimentation in the global novel form Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90h9h55q Author Reid, Mary I. Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO “Nowhere If Not Here”: The Ethics of Queer Experimentation in the Global Novel Form A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Mary Reid Committee in charge: Professor Rosemary George, Chair Professor Fatima El-Tayeb Professor Nadine George Professor Margaret Loose Professor Kathryn Shevelow 2012 The Dissertation of Mary Reid is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2012 iii It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions. Narrative itself is the performance of that very procedure. - Zadie Smith iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page……………………………………………………………………… iii Epigraph……………………………………………………………………………. iv Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………... v Vita…………………………………………………………………………………. vi Abstract…………………………………………………………………………….. vii Introduction………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 1…………………………………………………………………………… 47 Chapter 2…………………………………………………………………………… 99 Chapter 3…………………………………………………………………………… 146 Chapter 4…………………………………………………………………………… 194 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………. 246 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………... 252 v VITA 2004 Honors Bachelor of Arts, English, With Distinction, University of Guelph 2005 Master of Arts, English, University of Alberta 2005-2006 Teaching Assistant, Thurgood Marshall College, University of California, San Diego 2007 Teaching Assistant, Literature Department, University of California, San Diego 2007-2009 Teaching Assistant, Earl Warren College, University of California, San Diego 2009-2010 Teaching Assistant, Literature Department, University of California, San Diego 2012 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego PUBLICATIONS “‘This is the World as We Have Made It’: Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Poetics of History.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews (Spring/Summer 2006): 36-54. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Literatures in English Postcolonial Literature Professor Rosemary George The Novel Professors Rosemary George and Kathryn Shevelow Feminist and Queer Studies Professors Rosemary George and Fatima El-Tayeb Poetry and Modernism Professor Margaret Loose vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Nowhere If Not Here”: The Ethics of Queer Experimentation in the Global Novel Form by Mary Reid Doctor of Philosophy in Literature Professor Rosemary George, Chair This dissertation analyzes a selection of novels by four postcolonial authors, Ama Ata Aidoo, Arundhati Roy, Shani Mootoo, and Zadie Smith, and theorizes “queering” as an ethical literary procedure in which experimentation with narrative form challenges the norms of narrative that uphold heteronormative and liberal individualist models of the human. Each author’s experimental engagement with the novel form effects a transformation in the form and function of the novel itself, thus reinventing the ethical potential of the novel and revising understandings of the human. In these novels, the literary practice of queering challenges the norms of narrative realism, including its limited construction of the human as the heteronormative liberal individual subject, so as to articulate an ethical stance in narrative and reinvent the form of the global novel in vii English in the contemporary world. Contextualizing my theoretical approach with recent work in postcolonial studies, this dissertation engages in current debates about the purpose and aims of postcolonial literary studies in the contemporary, globalized world. Drawing upon the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, Aamir Mufti, Paul Jay, Sankaran Krishna, and Sanjay Krishnan, as well as Martha Nussbaum and Nancy Armstrong, this study argues for the value and significance of the ethical potential of the literary. My intervention suggests that queer experimental practice in narrative challenges normative ways of understanding and being in the world, including the values upheld by narratives of globalization, consumer capitalism, progress, and development. While the novel has, since the eighteenth century, been one of the primary forms for consolidating the liberal individual subject as the dominant model of the human, the novels in this study imagine the human as inherently interconnected, a shift in understanding that aligns with the current planetary realities of climate change. In light of planetary shifts caused by global warming, the science of climate change, and the recognition of human beings as a geological force, the ethics of queer experimentation in the global novel form offers a site in which to imagine the human otherwise—as planetary, futural, and connected. viii Introduction: Literary Reading and the Postcolonial Novel: Ethics and Experiment in the Literatures of Global English Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. - Arundhati Roy, War Talk Queering the Novel Form As scholars of the novel have recognized, the novel has, since its beginnings in the eighteenth century, been the primary literary form for the construction the liberal individual subject. This study suggests that narrative itself is also structured by and shores up the heteronormative. The novel form is not only the site in which the liberal individual is created, but also the site in which heteronormativity is reproduced through narrative. As Susan Lanser has suggested about the eighteenth-century novel, “one underpinning of the ‘rising’ novel is precisely its investment in consolidating a heterosexual subjectivity” (497). In this dissertation, I analyze a selection of postcolonial novels by four authors, and theorize a literary procedure that I call “queering” as an ethical practice in which experimental literary strategies challenge, and effectively queer, the norms of narrative that support dominant, and heteronormative, ways of understanding human being. Recognizing that narratives of capitalist development, progress, and globalization simultaneously structure and are structured by the values of liberal individualism, I demonstrate how the work of each author queers and destabilizes the primacy of the liberal individual subject, as well as the heteronormativity that structures dominant thought about what it means to be human. Each author’s engagement with the novel form, through experimentation with narrative, challenges the assumptions 1 2 of liberal individualism and heteronormativity so as to effect a transformation in the form and function of the novel itself. In my analysis of novels by Ama Ata Aidoo, Arundhati Roy, Shani Mootoo, and Zadie Smith, I theorize the way in which the queer experimental strategies of these authors simultaneously challenge the heteronormativity of narrative and engage in an ethical literary practice of queering so as to revise the norms of narrative. The queer writing practice of these authors not only challenges the heteronormative structures of nation and narrative, but also, as I will demonstrate in this dissertation, articulates the ethical potential of the novel form. Through my analysis, I argue for the ethical value of the literary and theorize the experimental literary practice of queering as an ethical challenge to narrative norms. Rather than shoring up the normative values of liberal individualism that underlie dominant narratives of globalization, consumer capitalism, progress, and development, queer experimentation in the novel form challenges those values so as to articulate alternative possibilities for being human. The queer literary practice of these novels challenges the norms of narrative realism, including its limited construction of the human as the heteronormative liberal individual subject, so as to articulate an ethical stance in narrative and reinvent the form of the global novel in English in the contemporary world. Postcolonialism and Globalization In recent years, criticism and theory in postcolonial studies and postcolonial literary studies have been concerned with issues of transnationalism and globalization, and, more specifically, with the intersections, connections, and conflicts between postcolonialism and globalization. Initiating a line of questioning that continues into the 3 present, the 2005 collection edited by Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, and Antoinette Burton, Postcolonial Studies and Beyond , posed the question of what, in an era of accelerated globalization, the purpose and aims of postcolonial studies should be. The editors acknowledged that it was the predominance of globalization studies that prompted the book’s reassessment of the purpose and goals of postcolonial studies, and they reaffirmed the unique significance of the field of postcolonial studies, posing the following question: “what visions of a postcolonial world can we as humanists offer that will interrogate, perhaps even interrupt, the forms of globalization now dictated by politicians,