Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation maintains that Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics holds a crucial significance for how we analyze character and subjectivity in postcolonial Anglophone literary studies. To understand the ethical and political implications of globalization, we must examine the novel intersections between professional, affective, and political life that globality produces. Contemporary novels are uniquely positioned to make these intersections explicit. In the novels I examine, professional subjectivity both enables and undermines the individual's ability to mount a response to the narratives of human "community" that operate in biopolitical capitalism. In contrast to critical approaches that seek to celebrate these emergent forms of transnational community, I argue that these novels seek to intensify local tensions in order to trouble narratives of benevolent globalization. In a biopolitical order, "life" is fostered through economic and political structures that coordinate widely stratified forms of labor. For this reason, the professional realm becomes an important space through which the antagonisms produced by these structures are negotiated. Kazuo Ishiguro portrays affective laborers in ways that intensify the disjuncture between the professional production of communal affect, on one hand, and affect as a subjective experience, on the other. J. M. Coetzee explores contrasting forms of professional life to critique how the "human" is constructed in South Africa both before and after the formal end of apartheid, and to accentuate the increasingly acute antagonism between liberal humanist political ideals and the radically conditioned nature of human subjectivity. Michael Ondaatje uses professional discourses to call attention to the ways bodies are specialized in biopolitical structures. When these specialized bodies come into contact, they can unexpectedly imprint one another's way of perceiving the world, and this imprint can serve as an alternative to the mass perception that biopolitical "communities" offer. In sum, I read these novelists as particularly rich instances of how subjectivity can gain a critical edge in our postcolonial present. As transnational writers whose literary production has been conditioned by the legacies of the British Empire, they are invested in sustaining, as richly as possible, the dissonances that prevent global communities from fully taking shape.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2011)
Access Conditions
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Citation
Babcock, David J.,
"Biopolitics, Professional Subjectivity, and Postcolonial Anglophone Literary Studies: Ishiguro, Coetzee, Ondaatje"
(2011).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0GM85JW
