INHUMAN TRANSACTIONS? REPRESENTING THE COMMODIFICATION OF HUMAN BODY PARTS A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Shital Pravinchandra Laxmidas August 2009 © 2009 Shital Pravinchandra Laxmidas INHUMAN TRANSACTIONS? REPRESENTING THE COMMODIFICATION OF HUMAN BODY PARTS Shital Pravinchandra Laxmidas, Ph.D. Cornell University 2009 This dissertation explores the commodification of the human body that emerges from the relationship between late capitalism and biomedical advances in transplant technology. A closer look at the circuits of organ trade shows that the trafficking of human organs perpetuates the structures of economic exploitation that characterised colonialism in its heyday: organs travel from formerly colonized nations to former metropoles, from black/brown bodies to white ones, from poor to rich. In the wake of biotechnology, I argue, the commodification of the human body is taking on new, predatory forms that can only be understood in the context of (de)colonization, globalization and late capitalism. I begin by examining organ commodification in relation to Karl Marx’s theorisation of the commodification of labour-power, and then proceed to examine organ harvesting, transplanting and trafficking as represented in three contemporary texts: Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Harvest (1996), Stephen Frears’s film Dirty Pretty Things (2003) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005). These texts grapple with contemporary debates around organ harvesting and stage the new ethical dilemmas to which the use and abuse of transplant technologies gives rise. They engage with this newly materialised way of commoditising the body in a way that allows us to think about organ exchange, not as a transaction forever trapped between the dynamic of altruistic donation and commoditised exchange, but as a site from which to examine the fraught relationship that exists between organ donors/sellers and organ receivers/buyers. A comparison of all three works reveals the need to understand transplant technologies and the commoditization of the human body that they permit as inextricable from the empowering yet disturbingly predatory effects that biotechnologies have on our understanding of death, where death is increasingly imagined as a fate that technology can endlessly keep at bay. Drawing attention to themselves as literary works, these texts dare to imagine and interrogate the future that biotechnology both promises and threatens us with. In my literary-critical readings, I make a claim for literature’s ability to stand as a constant counterpoint to the instrumental logic that characterises organ commodification, signalling instead, to a space beyond such instrumentality. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Shital Pravinchandra dislikes the question “Where are you from?” because she does not know how to answer it. She was the last member of her generation to be born in Mozambique. Unlike her parents and older cousins, who were born in Mozambique during the time it was a Portuguese colony, Shital was born after independence, in the capital city renamed Maputo. Shital’s grandparents hail from Gujarat, India’s westernmost state. Like many other Gujaratis, they left India for East and Southeast Africa, settling there as traders. In the wake of the civil war that broke out in Mozambique following independence, Shital’s family migrated to Europe, choosing, after many detours, to settle in the world’s first modern colony: the Canary Islands, Spain. Shital’s parents sent her to an international school because they wanted her to learn English. Shital grew up speaking Gujarati at home, English at school and Spanish everywhere else. To a large extent, this division continues to apply. In 1996, Shital left the Canaries, a place she still considers home and where her parents and other family continue to reside, in order to attend the University of London. She received her B.A in French and Hindi in 2000 and an MA in Comparative Literature, also from the University of London, in 2001. iii iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee members Natalie Melas, Biodun Jeyifo, Shelley Feldman and Mary Pat Brady for their seminars and their work, for the enthusiasm and faith with which they backed my project and the care and encouragement with which they read my work. From my friends in Ithaca I learnt as much as I did from graduate school. I owe a special thank you to them all. Sze Wei Ang and Tsitsi Jaji, my cohort, I thank for their help and support throughout. To Akin Adesokan and Ogaga Ifowodo I give thanks for being ideal neighbours and for making my parents feel so welcome when they visited. Jorge Peña shared his music, his sense of humour and his pragmatism, always making me look forward to a visit to Olin Library at the end of a long day. Cristina Lanzas I thank for her contagious calmness, smile and good taste in wine; Fede Fridman for his conversation and restlessness. I thank Abe Zubarev for his kindness, his concern and for our long conversations, and Katherine Groo for shared moments and for her belief in this project. I am also grateful to Alfredo Sosa-Velasco, first reader of Chapter 4, for his comments, but even more, perhaps, for our shared memories of Alaska y Dinarama and other ‘gems’ from ’80s and ’90s Spain. I am grateful that I met Abhijit Patnaik and Daniel Tonozzi just before I left Ithaca: writing would have been unbearable without their sense of fun and their kindness. Krupa Shandilya I thank for a never ending supply of warmth, friendship, acronyms and chai. For our Sunday brunches, for countless rides in ‘Chupette’ and, above all, for being v my first and unfailing friend in Ithaca I want to thank Nathalie Nicod. Last, but hardly least, I thank Stanka Radovic, for unconditional friendship and hospitality. I am grateful to Mary Pat for hosting and leading our dissertation group meetings and to all its members for sharing their work with me, and taking the time to read mine so carefully. Part of this project took shape during a semester spent at Berkeley. I want to thank Rakesh Bhandari, Karl Britto, Lawrence Cohen and Michael Rubenstein for taking the time to discuss their ideas with me; Usha Jain for her fantastic Hindi classes and Scott Schlossberg for sharing notes, tips about where to find the best coffee and plenty of good times. From my very first day in Ithaca, Sue Besemer touched me with her kindness; I thank her for her readiness to provide a word of encouragement, a ride or help with getting hold of an elusive signature. Tomás Beviá in Romance Studies was an inspiring course leader, and I want to thank him for trusting his teaching assistants, for his advice and for his infectious enthusiasm. I am grateful also to Stephen Donatelli for observing my seminars, for his feedback and for his commitment to teaching writing. Thanks to Sujata Singh for choosing me to be her Hindi assistant and for her constant encouragement in my Hindi classes. I thank Masha Raskolnikov who, by taking an interest in my project and providing such encouragement, far exceeded her duties as Placement Officer. Thanks also to all my students in Cornell for their questions, their honesty and, ultimately, for teaching me so much. Writing would have proved impossibly solitary without Ila, Pravin, Anand, Andrea and Phil who were with me even when it came to distances. I thank them for vi their patience, their phone calls, their much awaited visits, their tales from home and, in dedicating this thesis to them, for more than I can say. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL iii SKETCH DEDICATION iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v TABLE OF CONTENTS viii INTRODUCTION The Biotechnological Revolution and Organ 1 Transplantation CHAPTER 1 Special Commodities: Nature, Labour-Power 27 and the Live Human Organ CHAPTER 2 New Technologies and Dangerous Fantasies: 53 Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest CHAPTER 3 Hospitality for Sale, or Dirty PrettyThings 80 CHAPTER 4 Undeferrable Donations: Kazuo Ishiguro’s 110 Never Let Me Go CONCLUSION Imagining the Future 144 BIBLIOGRAPHY 164 viii Introduction THE BIOTECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION AND ORGAN TRANSPLANTATION [T]he attempt to [...] save human affairs from their frailty by dealing with them as though they were or could become the planned products of human making has first of all resulted in channelling the human capacity for action, for beginning new and spontaneous processes which without men would never come into existence, into an attitude towards nature which up to the latest stage of the modern age had been one of exploring natural laws and fabricating objects out of natural material. [Now] [...] we have begun to act into nature [...] This started harmlessly enough with the experiment in which men were no longer content to observe, to register, and contemplate whatever nature was willing to yield in her own appearance, but began to prescribe conditions and to provoke natural processes. [...] [It] has finally ended in a veritable act of ‘making’ nature, that is, of creating ‘natural’ processes which without men would never exist and which earthly nature by herself seems incapable of accomplishing... Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition I Confounding Promises It was 1958, after the world had witnessed the first use of nuclear weapons, when Hannah Arendt urged us, in the pages of The Human Condition, to ask ourselves where the ethical, legal and ontological limits of scientific and medical progress should lie. Today, in the age of cloning, genetic modification of organisms, organ transplantation, new reproductive technologies and human genome mapping, this question is equally pressing. Our medical technologies are ripe with paradoxical possibilities that, on the one hand, invite us to marvel at its achievements and to hope for still more dazzling cures.1 On the other hand, we may recoil from the hubristic overtones of medicine’s promises, and fear the consequences of a looming society in which the naturally given is increasingly replaceable by the artificially engineered.