This project evaluates the twinned discourses of globalism and humanitarianism through an analysis of the body in the postcolonial novel. In offering celebratory accounts of the promises of globalization, recent movements in critical theory have privileged the cosmopolitan, transnational, and global over the postcolonial. Recognizing the potential pitfalls of globalism, these theorists have often turned to transnational fiction as supplying a corrective dose of humanitarian sentiment that guards a global affective community against the potential exploitations and excesses of neoliberalism. While authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, and Rohinton Mistry have been read in a transnational, cosmopolitan framework––which they have often courted and constructed––I argue that their theorizations of the body contain a critical, postcolonial rejoinder to the liberal humanist tradition that they seek to critique from within. The project attempts not only to trace the changing relationship between corporeality, technology, environment, and the state, but also to interrogate the foundational myths and inherent limits of a transnational humanitarianism that unwittingly masks deeper structural inequalities. Many theorizations of the body continue to frame it within the familiar dualism of embodiment and dehumanization. While building on work in feminist theory and trauma studies, this dissertation analyzes theorizations of the body within postcolonial literary texts that negotiate the promises and perils of an emergent globalism. In doing so, it hopes to recover the contributions that the literary can offer as a supplement to legal and political discourse. By actively theorizing the relationship between bodily experience and social structures, transnational, postcolonial authors challenge forms of global governance that, while couched in narratives of progress, have controlled and harnessed bodies in new ways.
Ettensohn, Derek M.,
"Globalism, Humanitarianism, and the Body in Postcolonial Literature"
(2014).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0WS8RKT
