Resisting Development: Land and Labour in Israeli, Palestinian and Sri Lankan Literature ! Nicola Anne Robinson ! ! PhD ! University of York ! English ! September 2014 ! ! ABSTRACT ! This thesis examines literary representations which depict the evolution of capitalist development in narratives by Israeli, Palestinian and Sri Lankan writers. This comparative study is the first of its kind to bring the contexts of Israel/Palestine and Sri Lanka together. Collectively, my chapters analyse a range of literary texts by writers including Yosef Brenner, Sahar Khalifeh, Punyakante Wijenaike and Ambalavaner Sivanandan which explore the separatist ethnonational conflicts. I focus on narratives which critique the dominant discourse of development in their societies, through the formal and literary strategies that the writers utilise such as utopia, realism and melodrama. I argue that the texts I consider draw attention to the impact of uneven development on the content and form of literature in order to resist the current dispensation. This resistance is invaluable when one considers that development continues to be a contentious and divisive issue in Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka and beyond today, yet one that has clear implications for sustainable peace. As a result, my research highlights that literature can play an invaluable role in anticipating, if not imagining, alternatives to the current world order. ! ! ! ! ! ! !2 Table of Contents ! ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................5 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION ..................................................................................6 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................7 Uneven Development, World-Systems and World Literature .........................7 Colonialism as Spatial Control ..........................................................11 The Interconnection of Development and Nationalism ..............................18 Literature and Development ............................................................25 Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka and Postcolonial Studies .............................33 Outline of Thesis ..........................................................................40 CHAPTER ONE ......................................................................................................42 Labour Zionism and Zionist Development .............................................50 Hebrew Literature: From the Haskalah to Zionism ..................................54 Theodor Herzl and Zionism ..............................................................59 Theodor Herzl’s Old-New-Land ..........................................................63 Yosef Brenner’s Breakdown and Bereavement .......................................73 S. Yizhar’s Preliminaries ..................................................................86 CHAPTER TWO .....................................................................................................98 Occupation: An Historical Overview ...................................................102 Palestinian Writing and World Literature .............................................105 Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns ...........................................................111 The Adoption of Neoliberalism .........................................................126 Raja Shehadeh’s Occupation Diaries .................................................129 CHAPTER THREE ...............................................................................................137 Colonial Capitalist Development ......................................................143 Divergent Reception ....................................................................145 Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle ..........................................152 Indigenous Development ............................................................164 !3 Punyakante Wijenaike and the Reception of Sri Lankan Literature ..............168 Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth ......................................171 CHAPTER FOUR ..................................................................................................187 The Imposition of Capitalist Development ...........................................191 State Policy and Neoliberalism: Historical Overview ...............................194 Sri Lankan Anglophone Writing: Audiences and Reception .........................197 A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies ..................................................208 Tsunami: Humanitarian Assistance, Development Aid and Sarvodaya ...........223 Isankya Kodithuwakku’s ‘Shallow Canoes’ ..........................................228 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................238 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................246 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !4 ! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisors Anna Bernard and Ziad Elmarsafy for their unfailing support, encouragement and patience throughout the course of researching and writing this thesis. Thank you to Claire Chambers for her insightful comments, questions and advice as thesis advisory panel member. I am also grateful to Claire Westall for fruitful discussions and a conference trip to Dublin. I am indebted to the Department of English and Related Literature and Humanities Research Centre at the University of York for creating a stimulating environment for research, discussion and innovation. Thank you to my friends for their companionship, coffee and cake breaks and pot lucks. This thesis is dedicated to my family, especially my parents and wee brother, for their unconditional love, emotional and financial support and all the time we spend together whether chatting, watching Star Trek or eating scones. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !5 ! AUTHOR’S DECLARATION The work presented in this thesis is my own. A version of material included in Chapter One appeared as “Utopian Zionist Development in Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland.” Green Letters 17, no. 3 (2013): 223-35. Material from Chapters Three and Four has been published as “Indigenous Development in Sri Lankan Literature: Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth.” South Asian Review 33, no.3 (2012): 89-107. This thesis has not previously been submitted for any degree at this or any other university. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !6 INTRODUCTION ! [Postcolonial studies omits to address] the impact of capitalist intrusion on the socioeconomic forms and institutions of precolonial societies, the effects of combined and uneven development structurally, socially, and aesthetically…the transformation of indigenous inequalities into class relationships, the ideologies and aspirations of the anticolonial movements, the continuing dominion of metropolitan capitalism, the class structures and conflicts in postindependence nation-states, and the role of neoliberalism and native compradors in the retreats of postcolonial regimes. - Benita Parry, “What is Left in Postcolonial Studies?”1 ! Uneven Development, World-Systems and World Literature This comparative study is the first of its kind to bring the contexts of Israel/Palestine and Sri Lanka together and discusses the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first- century capitalist development is imagined through literary representations of land and labour. I identify and investigate the relationship between local, lived experience and the protest against economic policies and political power. Exploring the relationship between resistance and economic development, this thesis examines the literature through which that resistance is articulated in separatist ethnonational conflict. The term ‘development’ has often been problematically measured in connection to modernity and understood as ‘progress’, which suggests a linear trajectory from agricultural economy to industrial economy, underdeveloped to developed. This characterisation means the ‘development’ of society’s or nation’s 1 Benita Parry, “What is Left in Postcolonial Studies?” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 344. !7 economies are then measured against the experiences of Europe and the US.2 In this thesis, I use the term ‘development’ to refer to the specific state policies and practices put in place to stimulate economic growth within the capitalist world- system. My historical trajectory can be mapped onto the world-systems mode of analysis of the world capitalist system.3 Stephen Shapiro asserts that world-systems analysis ‘relates political geography to economic history by mapping long waves of economic expansion and contraction caused by the intrinsic falling rate of profit generated by capitalist regimes of accumulation against the spatial reorganisation.’4 As I explain in more detail below, my study’s theoretical framework draws on the ways that territorial expansion and the power to control resources in colonialism and ethnonational conflict leads to the uneven re-organisation of capital and space. Thus, I agree with Nicholas Brown who argues for ‘establishing the interpretive horizon of twentieth-century literature at capitalism’s internal limit’, at the same time as being wary of conflating one literature with another, because ‘capitalism as a global economic system is