Description
- Abstract:
- My dissertation challenges both the assertion and dismissal of identity politics in the humanities through a queer-diasporic overhaul of the concept of "narcissism." Both the sciences and humanities usually interpret narcissism ahistorically, as a state that ignores social difference to guard the boundaries of the self. For a number of scholars in literary and queer studies, such a psychoanalytic notion of narcissistic egocentrism is what explains the "illusion" of identity politics. These post-structuralist scholars see political and aesthetic articulations of identity as regressions into cultural essentialism and antithetical to the radical democracy offered by the mobility of linguistic and sexual desire. Arguing against post-structuralism's delocalized approach to sexuality and signification, and by turning to intersections between ignored strands of psychoanalysis, anti-colonial polemics, Asian American and African American literature, my dissertation mounts a counter-critique of the hierarchy between "literariness" and the narcissism of identity politics. Through minoritarian readings of the relationships between psychic life, social interpellation, and literary praxis, I uncover a genealogy of literary narcissism to shed light on the material and uneven production of an ethnicized and gendered desire for political identitarianism. I contend that, instead of dismissing or celebrating identity politics, we need to see it as a differential encounter with forms of alterity produced by categories of social difference—such as race, class, ethnicity, and gender—sustaining and sustained by global capital.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2013)
Access Conditions
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Citation
Maitra, Aniruddha,
"Narcissism and the Scene of Reading: Towards a Global Politics of Local Aesthetics"
(2013).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z02F7KRQ
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Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Modern Culture and Media department....