In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary 9780231537766

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IN STEREOTYPE

Literature Now

LITERATURE NOW Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures. Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the TwentyFirst Century Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

IN STEREOTYPE South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary

Mrinalini Chakravorty

Columbia University Press

New York

Material in chapter 4 previously appeared in “The Dead That Haunt Anil’s Ghost: Subaltern Difference and Postcolonial Melancholia” PMLA 128, no. 3 (May 2013): 542–58. Material in chapter 5 appeared in a previous form as “Brick Lane Blockades: The Bioculturalism of Migrant Domesticity,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 3 (2012): 503–28. Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chakravorty, Mrinalini. In stereotype : South Asia in the global literary imaginary / Mrinalini Chakravorty. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-231-16596-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-231-53776-6 (electronic) 1. South Asian literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. South Asian literature—21st century—History and criticism. 3. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature. I. Title. PK5416.C43 2014 891.4—dc23 2013040700

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Jacket design by Noah Arlow References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Lindon Warren Barrett

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue: Stereotypes as Provocation 1 1. Why the Stereotype? Why South Asia?

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2. To Understand Me, You’ll Have to Swallow a World: Margins, Multitudes, and the Nation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children 50 3. Slumdog or White Tiger? The Abjection and Allure of Slums 85 4. The Dead That Haunt Anil’s Ghost: Subaltern Stereotypes and Postcolonial Melancholia 119 5. From Bangladesh to Brick Lane: The Biocultural Stereotypes of Migrancy 151 6. Good and Bad Transnationalisms?: Outsourcing and Terror Epilogue: The Afterlife of Stereotypes 221 Notes

233

Bibliography Index 305

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book begins long before it takes the shape of one, sometimes in fragments and in conversations that only later seep into its pages. The ideas in this book first germinated in the many rich conversations I had with a fabulous cohort of mentors, colleagues, and friends at the University of California, Irvine. As far as these things are knowable, the initial inspiration for the project came from David Lloyd’s seminar “Modernity and the Irish Body,” which to this day serves as my model for how to read meticulously while challenging the assumptions of texts even when succumbing to their pleasures. Irish colonial modernity, of course, was shot through with colonialist stereotypes of Irish otherness. Yet the fantastic recalcitrance of the Irish in appropriating and redeploying these stereotypes toward insurgent, countercolonial practices is a lesson that David taught so very well and one that endured with me. I feel deeply fortunate to have been inspired by David’s example, and for finding such a brilliant and generous interlocutor who spurred my early interests in cultural stereotypes and compelled me to run with it in my own way. I am also grateful for the steadfast encouragement provided by Gabriele Schwab and J. Hillis Miller. My work has benefited immensely from their truly unorthodox and intellectually lively engagement. Gaby has been a friend and confidante without parallel; from her I have learned that scholarly curiosity should be motivational, ethically directed, and

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spellbinding. To Hillis, I am infinitely grateful for showing me the importance of tackling knotty problems with grace and diligence. He has also been a tireless advocate on my behalf, selflessly sharing both his sparkling reflections on literature as well as his immense experience of the profession. Indeed David, Gaby, and Hillis have persistently modeled a generosity of spirit and responsiveness that I can only hope to emulate. They have all read multiple iterations of this book in its present and former incarnations with unfailing enthusiasm and eye to detail. That the book is not perfect is no measure of their failure to offer timely and rigorous feedback; any shortcomings in the book remain indeed my own. This book would not have been possible without Lindon Barrett, who continues to be a vital and prevailing influence in my thought and life; I dedicate this work to him. Above all, Lindon was a friend of the deepest, most fiercely loyal kind, and I miss his presence terribly. Without Lindon, I would have little concept of what it means to be truly passionate about living a life of the mind motivated by an acute desire to see a more reciprocal, equitable world. He was singular in encouraging a unique kind of intellectual camaraderie and risk-taking among his students and colleagues, many of whom were part of the cultural studies cohort that thrived in Irvine under his direction. I thank Leila Neti, Janet Neary, Amy Parsons, Arnold Pan, Bruce Barnhart, Naomi Greyser, Ginger Hill, Linh Hua, Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, and Jared Sexton for the many energetic conversations we had about culture, race, and representation as part of this group. Many other friendships sustained the initial conceptions of this project, including in particular those with Jeffrey Atteberry, Barbara Antoniazzi, Mariam Beevi, Lan Duong, Bond Love, Patricia Pierson, and Jim Ziegler. Rachel Meyer deserves a mention all of her own: she singlehandedly infused these years with fun, hilarity, gossip, and intellectual vigor for so many in her circle. I miss her zeal for life. At Irvine, thanks are also due to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Steve Mailloux, Julia Lupton, Jim Steintrager, Beheroze Shroff, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wolfgang Iser, Rey Chow, Homer Brown, Glen Mimura, Ketu Katrak, Rei Terada, Fredric Jameson, and Etienne Balibar. In many ways, a book is a bit of a time machine that travels with the author over time. If this book’s expedition began in California, it has since crisscrossed many places and changed shape in each sojourn. At

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Kenyon College in Ohio, I benefited greatly from discussions with Jesse Matz, Ted Mason, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, Wendy Singer, and Joseph Campana. I also thank Sara Clarke Kaplan, Kirstie Dorr, and Asha Nadkarni for friendship, spirited optimism, and their conviction that what we dreamed collectively would always take us further. Across time and space, the direction the book ultimately traveled also profited from critical conversations with and the generous responses of Sangeeta Ray, Nancy Armstrong, and Warren Montag. While the first inspiration for this book was formed in California, its final shape owes everything to the insightful and sustained support it received in Virginia. More than anything, this is a book born in Virginia. For this, my colleagues in the department of English at the University of Virginia deserve my most heartfelt gratitude. In particular, I thank Jahan Ramazani, Gordon Braden, Eric Lott, Caroline Rody, Steve Arata, Cristina Dela Colleta, and Karen Chase for offering sage advice during the first moments of revision. At key moments over the years, Susan Fraiman, Anna Brickhouse, Sandhya Shukla, Bruce Holsinger, Rita Felski, and Michael Levenson asked incisive questions and made invaluable suggestions that breathed new life into the project. I will forever be beholden to Susan, Anna, Bruce, and Sandhya for being such good friends and for being so ever ready to read and comment on new material at short notice. My thanks to Gordon Braden, Jahan Ramazani, Alison Booth, and Cynthia Wall, who, as chairs of the department, contributed more to the making of this book than they know. For their resolute friendship, brilliant provocations, and timely strategic help in making sure that the project endured past my own insecurities with it, I am especially indebted to Deborah McDowell and Marlon Ross. From the first moment of our encounter, Debbie has been a stalwart friend and ally; her gift of looking past convention while remaining practical is one that has truly inspired. I thank her also for the opportunity to be involved in the rich intellectual life of the Carter G. Woodson Institute. In Marlon, I happened upon a perfect mentor. Indeed, I am at a loss for words to convey my appreciation of the help he has extended me over the years. He has a rare talent for asking the kinds of searching, probing questions that electrify your own thoughts. Beyond this, his ability to enter into subtle conversations on topics that are far afield of his own and to consistently grasp the larger stakes of an argument that at

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times were obscure even to me while making them, and his willingness to always say yes to requests to read, are profoundly astounding. As much as writing is a solitary endeavor, it also thrives on nurture and sociality. For laughter, delectable foods, spritely conversation, and all manner of much-needed breaks, I thank my friends Sylvia Chong, Michael Puri, Neeti Nair, Jennifer Tsien, Geeta Patel, Kath Weston, Lisa Woolfork, Christopher Krentz, Yarimar Bonilla, Brad Pasanek, Jennifer Greeson, and Vicki Olwell. A special shout out is reserved for Zahid Chaudhary—coconspirator and last-minute reader par excellence. I have also been fortunate to have a team of outstanding graduate students at the University of Virginia who have interrogated, inspired, and contributed to my scholarship in ways that, while not always perceptible, are absolutely vital. I am proud to stand in solidarity with the path-breaking projects of Alwin Jones, Z’etoile Imma, Anuj Kapoor, Sonya Donaldson, Shermaine Jones, Alex Gil, Marie Ostby, Jesse Bordwin, and Annie Galvin. Anuj’s tireless research assistance and thought-provoking responses, especially in the last years of writing, have been equally energizing. I also thank the many others in my seminars and in the Postcolonial Studies reading group at Virginia whose insights have opened new avenues of thought at every turn. This book would never have been started, restarted, or finished without the constancy of love I have received from my family. I feel immeasurable gratitude for my father, Milan Chakravorty, who is my model for an unfalteringly energetic work ethic, modesty, and calmness of spirit. I thank him for asking time and again, “Is the book finished yet?”—a question that, while irksome, was infinitely motivational. My mother, Joba Chakravorty, has taught me through example that one must always be open to refashioning oneself. I continue to be sustained by her cheerfulness, wit, and belief in me. For my sister, Meenakshy: what can I say? The adventure continues, and I am so happy that she is on this ride with me. I admire her strength, intellect, and joy for life. My thanks to her for remarking so astutely on the whole manuscript, and for being ever so ready to talk about things. I am also delighted now to include my niece Shaanti in our mix, for her unparalleled enthusiasm and chatterbox inquisitiveness. Thanks are also due to Kamalesh and Bharati Banerjee, Robi Banerjee, Soumya Raychaudhuri, Uma Bose, Reba Verma, Kishalay and Swati Chakraborty, and Patrashila and Sulekha Bhattacharya for

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many kindnesses along the way. For being my family on a different shore, I thank R. M. Neti, Sanju, and Suseela Neti (especially for her many culinary offerings and camaraderie), and Jaya Leslie. I am also lucky to be in the exquisite circle of love, life, and laughter that I share with Leila Neti, Jeffrey Atteberry, and Narayan Neti. For emergency reading, editing, and feedback, I couldn’t ask for a better person than Jeff. For his constant friendship, I am profoundly grateful. Leila, I thank, for unselfishly sharing her words and ideas in order to make sure that this is a better book than it was. I am glad for her brilliance, for our travels, and for the enduring closeness that comes from sharing life in full color. Narayan remains my source of wonder. I wait for when he can read the book and tell me what’s wrong with it while reassuring me, as only he can, that “it’s okay.” The fact is that all of these people will only feel joy when the book, imperfect as it may be, is before them, and for this I feel very fortunate. Over the years, I have rehearsed portions of the book’s arguments at various conferences and colloquia, and I thank all those who offered valuable feedback. Specifically, I’m grateful to interlocutors at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA) conventions, the University of Oklahoma, Kenyon College, the University of Nevada, Reno, Old Dominion University, Pitzer College, Occidental College, and San Diego State University. I have also benefited tremendously from participating in the two-yearlong Forced Migration Seminar organized by Alon Confino and Jeffrey Rossman and sponsored by the Page Barbour Initiative at the University of Virginia. Thanks are also due to the research librarians at the University of Virginia, the National Library, Kolkata, and the British Library, London. Portions of chapter 4 and 5 have originally appeared as articles in PMLA 128, no. 3 (May 2013), published by the Modern Language Association of America and in Modern Fiction Studies 58, no. 3 (2012), and I thank the editors at each journal for permission to reprint. When my own belief in finding the book a suitable publishing home was ebbing, I was lucky that the manuscript received such timely, conscientious, and amazingly supportive editorial guidance as that given by Rebecca Walkowitz, Matthew Hart, and David James. Not only did Rebecca, Matthew, and David see it as a fitting addition for their series, Literature Now, they were also seminal in clarifying much-needed revisions

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for the whole structure and flow of the book, and in setting a manageable schedule. They renewed my faith in the blind submission process that is such a cornerstone of our intellectual lives, and for this I remain infinitely in their debt. In Philip Leventhal at Columbia University Press I found an editor who was unwavering in his support and care for shepherding the project through its various stages from securing readers reports in lightning swift fashion and onward. Without a doubt, the anonymous reviewers for Columbia University Press read the manuscript with care and made numerous invaluable suggestions that improved the book. It has also been a pleasure to receive meticulous and extraordinarily efficient copyediting advice from Whitney Johnson, Leslie Kriesel, and Patti Bower, and the aid of Heather Jones in preparing the index. I am grateful to them all for ensuring that the book is in print. In Stereotype would not have been what it is without the institutional support given by the Regents at the University of California; numerous summer grants from the department of English and Comparative Literature at UC, Irvine; the Center for Writing and Translation, Irvine; the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell University; a Midwest Faculty Seminar Grant from Kenyon College and the University of Chicago; the Diversity Fellowship from the Teaching Resource Center at the University of Virginia; and a Summer grant, a Sesquicentennial Fellowship, and a publication subvention from the University of Virginia.

IN STEREOTYPE

PROLOGUE STEREOTYPES AS PROVOCATION

How might a literary festival mediate the slippery shuffle of cultural stereotypes between real and phantasmic terrains? Does staging a representation of a certain culture, say of South Asia, in a book, film, or at a festival inevitably open it to the world as an immutable type? How might we think about the collusions, collisions, and transformations that ensue when cultural representations in whatever form seem indistinguishable from stereotypes? What are the conditions under which cultures circulate or congeal globally? What are the ethical responsibilities and political risks that make claiming and disowning stereotypes so crucial to how we read the Anglophone novel today? This book attends to these questions by prying into the stereotype’s perceived flatness, arguing instead that it is the stereotype’s elasticity that makes it indispensable to how global fiction is read. In Stereotype confronts head-on the ambivalent nature of the stereotype, both as a general concept and in its particularly prevalent South Asian iterations. The book theorizes the seductive force of the stereotype as an explanatory mechanism while complicating our understanding of the use and persistent allure of predictable representations of South Asia. One of its core arguments is that the uses and effects of stereotypes must be considered from multiple positionalities. Through an examination of a host of real and imagined stereotypes—hunger, crowdedness, filth, slums, death, migrant flight, terror, outsourcing—In Stereotype makes the case that

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such commonplaces about other worlds are crucial to shaping the ethics of global literature. The book draws on the influential work of Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Michael Ondaatje, Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, and Chetan Bhagat, among others, to show how stereotypes about South Asia offer us insight into the material and psychic investments of contemporary imaginative texts. By probing contexts ranging from the independence of the Indian subcontinent, to poverty tourism, civil war, migration, domestic labor, and terrorist radicalism, this book introduces an interpretive lens for reading the ethics of literary representations of cultural and global difference. Broadly, In Stereotype reevaluates the stakes of a contemporary fascination with transnational novels and films that manufacture global differences even as they stage intersubjective encounters between cultures through the use of stereotypes. Let us turn to the scene of a festival to see how questions about reading and cultural fluency swirl around stereotypes. From its inception in 2006 the Jaipur Literature Festival, which advertizes itself as the “Kumbh Mela [popular pilgrim festival] of Indian and International writing,” has attracted both critical praise and derision. Supported by the Sahitya Akademi (the Indian government’s official institute for literary and cultural studies), and with private sponsorships, the festival is held on the resplendent grounds of the Diggi Palace in Jaipur. The festival boasts that over five days in January, it brings together “writers and readers from across India and the wider world: from America, Europe, Africa, and from across the breadth of South Asia” so that they may, for free, indulge audiences in the appreciation of literary and other arts. By all reports, the efforts of the festival’s organizers, including William Dalrymple, the British travel writer on India; novelist Namita Gokhale; and the event and entertainment company Teamwork Production, have ensured an ever-burgeoning attendance at this popular literary fete. Indeed, the eagerly anticipated festival program each year reads as a veritable “Who’s Who” of contemporary literature. Such writers as J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri, V.  S. Naipaul, Orhan Pamuk, Hanif Kureishi, Jamaica Kincaid, Ahdaf Soueif, Ian McEwan, Hari Kunzru, Aminatta Forna, Vikram Seth, and Wole Soyinka have electrified global attention on the event. The festival has also featured some of the best-known and emerging Anglophone writers from India, such as Anuradha Roy, Kiran Desai, Chetan Bhagat, Pico Iyer, Tishani Doshi,

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Jeet Thayil, Indra Sinha, and others. Initially criticized for not including enough Indian-language events, the festival has since 2007 staged panels such as “Translating Bharat” and “On Women, Outcastes, Peasants, Rebels,” and has launched books such as that of the translated anthology of Tamil feminist poetry, Wild Girls, Wicked Words, in an effort to integrate Dalit, subaltern, and vernacular issues. Dalit writers at Jaipur have included Omprakash Valmiki, Chandra Bhan Prasad, and Kancha Ilaiah, while Mahasweta Devi, well known for her feminist fiction on Bengal’s tribals, most recently delivered the keynote address at the literary mela. As Rashmi Sadana notes, “In terms of the density of writers from different backgrounds in India, for these few days it [the festival] has become a fecund literary space . . . [where] substantive discussions do occur.” Yet, as most commentators on the festival note, the festival has a flashy, dazzling quality to it that seems to thrive on spectacle. Alongside serious literary conversations are marquee visits by socialites, celebrities, cricket icons, and film stars that alternately fuel buzz, stir controversies, and keep watchers gawking at what sometimes appears to be a theater of the absurd. So, for instance, the event is known as much for its party scenes, banquets, musical interludes, dance performances, and orchestrated celebrity sightings as for its literary meditations. A literary mela in India, it seems, must also feature the exhilaration of a visit by Oprah or Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, a possible encounter with cricketer Rahul Dravid, soul-making advice doled out by Deepak Chopra, parental counsel given by Amy Chua (of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother fame), and even a spiritual audience with the Dalai Lama. The frivolity of the festival perhaps sparks television personality Barkha Dutt’s fawning question to Oprah about how her first experience of India has been, which in turn yields from Oprah the vacuously obvious reply, “More people than I have ever seen in my life.” In tandem during Oprah’s much publicized visit to Jaipur, however, were the fierce protests and resulting controversy that raged about Salman Rushdie’s impending second visit to the festival to discuss his novel Midnight’s Children. What inevitably follows such incongruous juxtapositions of the bizarre and serious are intense disagreements about how the festival coheres, or rather makes incoherent, representations of South Asia on a global stage. Almost uncannily, the festival itself—even as it presents a platform for negotiating representations of the subcontinent—seems to mime a stereotype about South Asia’s fantastic inscrutability.

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Some of these stories veer toward the comedic—such as the many gaffes and cultural insensitivities that Oprah’s attitudes toward India reveal. In episodes of her show on India that aired following her foray to Jaipur, Oprah, as Rajyashree Sen mockingly notes, succeeded in showing “India as Westerners imagine it, one stereotype at a time.” If Oprah’s inability to grasp Indian eating habits, arranged marriages, or slum life is easily attributable to gauche stereotypes, questions about Jaipur’s staging of literary and popular culture in South Asia turn weighty in other contexts. The festival seems mired in murky debates over the ethics of how cultural authenticity may be staged, the risks of cultural tourism assumed, or the value of free speech and the foibles of literary and intellectual elitism expressed. William Dalrymple, one of the conference principals, and writer Hartosh Singh Bal, for instance, have been embroiled in an ad hominem war of words, accusing each other of failing to understand what it means to be Indian, or to represent India. Bal accuses Dalrymple of enlivening Raj nostalgia, claiming that Dalrymple has appointed himself “the pompous arbiter of literary merit in India.” This, Bal claims, reveals how “English mediates our own social hierarchy,” concluding that “if Jaipur matters as a festival, it is because of the writers from Britain it attracts.” For Bal, the festival typifies how “to take note of India requires making use of a certain romantic association that stretches back to the Raj.” Pointing out that “the British contingent, Brown, Black, and White, make up a minority within the minority of the firangi contingent,” Dalrymple’s retort to Bal is a caustic defense. In it, Dalrymple evinces his long and intimate ties to India, including his own body of work; defends the festival’s promotion of Dalit, bhasha, and minority Indian literatures; and accuses his detractor of “reverse racism.” Bal’s ire toward him, Dalrymple writes, is the “literary equivalent of pouring shit through an immigrant’s letterbox.” The quarrel between Bal and Dalrymple evidences how quickly trivial concerns that the festival may too easily trade in cultural stereotypes skitter toward truly damming ones. At the heart of Bal’s and Dalrymple’s tussle are the matters of cultural and racial authenticity, past colonial violations and present neocolonial inequities, and ultimately the ethics around how certain representations of South Asia are to be read. If Bal stereotypes Dalrymple and his staging of an Indian spectacle as a colonial hangover, Dalrymple jarringly appropriates for himself a

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particularly injurious stereotype—that of the ex-colonial immigrant in Britain—abjected through racial violence. In both instances, but particularly the latter, the gap between ground and figure that these stereotypes are supposed to cover is vast. That this dispute invites other disputes— Dalrymple’s claim that he “conceived, co-founded and co-directed” the festival, for example, is hotly contested by Pramod Kumar, who claims to be one of the originators of the event—speaks to the volatility of the stereotypes it engages and energizes. In a sense, the festival as a showcase of South Asian literary investments in the global arena is inseparable from the politics of what kinds of representations of the subcontinent are seen as permissible within the public sphere. Unsurprisingly, the most fractious disputes at Jaipur have been over the questions of free speech and religious and caste tolerance. In other words, these controversies have provoked passionate disagreements about whether certain stereotypes that emerge from them reflect the reality of India or its more vitriolic symbolic figurations. In 2012, when Oprah’s visit promised to eclipse the festival, what is known as the Rushdie Affair also threatened to derail it. The fatwa and violence that shadowed the publication of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses may seem a thing of the past, but protest over the author’s attendance revealed how it still simmers as a spectacular flashpoint of cultural contestation. Following protests and death threats, it was widely reported that Rushdie was coerced into cancelling his visit, while four authors—Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Ruchir Joshi, and Jeet Thayil—served as proxies, reading from The Satanic Verses. The fact that they faced legal trouble for doing so sparked numerous commentators to reflect, as Deji Olukotun does for PEN America, that the festival itself “has become a sort of proving ground for free expression” in India, where writers both reflect on human rights questions and directly experience its breach. Whether or not this is true, the festival’s staging of literature from, about, and in South Asia provokes deep contentions about what it means to represent the subcontinent. These skirmishes illuminate how stereotypes about India function as synapses that traffic between real and imaginary ways of how India may be read as part of the global literary and cultural marketplace. The theater of the stereotype aligned with the Jaipur Literature Festival illustrates the symptoms of stereotyping with which this book is concerned. In literary contexts, stereotypes muddle distinctions between

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real, historical conditions and their surreal aesthetic figurations. Even the staging of the scene of literary conversations, such as that of the festival, necessitates ethical negotiations about how South Asia circulates globally as a sign of a fixed or versatile cultural type. “The sign,” writes Roland Barthes, “is a follower, gregarious; in each sign sleeps that monster: a stereotype.” The myriad provocations that have sprung from the Jaipur Literature Festival make the urgency of locating and reading the ethical charge of aesthetic stereotypes all the more pressing. As both gregarious and monstrous signs, stereotypes pose critical questions for how representations of South Asia are generated and fathomed. In a sense, the fact that the festival itself, repeatedly characterized as “chaotic,” and “controversial,” has come to stand in for a certain representation of South Asia speaks to the slipperiness of stereotypes. Even when seeming to order a world—the festival as an organized forum for South Asian literature—the festival as stereotype escapes such ordering. The highly charged public arguments—about whether the festival should embrace a conspicuous consumption of literary arts alongside other glitz, whether Anglophone contexts overly dominate native language issues, whether some forms of free speech should be curtailed as hate speech, and the like—reveal instead the vast political and ethical stakes involved in reading the festival itself as a representational window into India. Beyond this, the Jaipur Literature Festival provides an example for what happens in the world of fiction itself, particularly within global Anglophone fiction, when certain works are self-consciously sampled as exemplary of South Asia. The difficulties of representing South Asia, apart from stereotypes, are what the festival allows us to glimpse. Speaking at the event, Amit Chaudhuri made the observation that, “if, as an Indian writer today, you write about say a samosa, you’ll be criticized for selling out to the West or deliberately exoticizing India. The Indian imagination, in its current form, has no room for the samosa in samosaness.” It is this fluctuation between real and representational South Asia that stereotypes, whether of samosas or something other, track. This book also follows the difficult politics of reading that such representations of South Asia initiate. If one of the problems is that the “real” thing, place, people, milieu, etc., is obscured by the politics that attach to its representation, then the other is the spectacular mobility of such stereotypes. To put it in another way, stereotypes often slide, as this book will reflect, seamlessly from page to

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picture and back as they do from literary to popular cultural consciousness and back, thus gaining a kind of widespread cultural currency. The novelist Amitav Ghosh offers this as his reflection on the uproar over Rushdie’s visit to Jaipur: “But the controversy also raises questions about another issue that touches directly upon writing: this is the way in which literature is coming to be embedded within a wider culture of public spectacles and performances.” Ghosh’s point touches upon two very seemingly disparate aspects to the festival that coalesce in the debates over Rushdie and free speech. The first is the manner in which the festival crystallizes all such ethical questions that arise around literary works in the form of social spectacle, or “tamasha,” as he calls it. The festival as a cultural spectacle, he argues, displaces issues central to literary representation itself onto other realms. Thus, the interaction between writerly intention and reader reception foregrounded by the “tamashastan” of the festival’s arena usurp the ethical problem posed by the literary text itself. Ghosh critiques the spectacular stage of the festival as an inadequate and obscuring forum for arbitrating the “deep anxieties about how certain groups are perceived and represented,” a task he sees as intrinsic to books themselves. Rather, he says, “books should have lives of their own,” and readers should be able to relate to the world of the book unmitigated by the politics of its presence in such book fairs. Although he writes in defense of Rushdie’s right to attend, Ghosh reflects on the larger conditions of the occasion that warrants that books be publicly scrutinized by readers in the presence of authors, who are then held publicly accountable for the worlds they imagine. It is this straightline correspondence between authors, texts, and readers that Ghosh finds most troubling about how festivals market literary consumption. Ghosh’s argument that books should be regarded as speaking for themselves and stripped of festival-style arbitration is important for a few key reasons. It situates the conflicts that rage in public over group representations as a textual one, always in excess of the mediating influences between readers and the author. Further, it allows us to step away from the overly local contexts of how a particular book is presented in its context, to consider a range of its significations across various cultural terrains. And, lastly, it suggests that the type of anxiety a book generates about what it represents may not always be readable in the context of publicly avowed positions. Rather, the ethical quandaries of a text may in fact engage some deeper

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dilemma about how group stereotypes are invoked, function, and transform across aesthetic and cultural spectrums. Indeed, it is interesting to note that the organizers of the Jaipur Literature Festival have themselves become wary of the type into which this event seems increasingly cast. In the aftermath of the festival’s Rushdie Affair, Dalrymple wrote, “Increasingly we have seen ourselves, and the festival we run, caricatured beyond all recognition.” It seems here that Dalrymple is recognizing one force of stereotypical rendering into which the festival has fallen. As caricature, the event imagined as a robust contemplation of literary culture in South Asia seems to have morphed into something static and unrecognizable from its ideal form. The solution that he later proposes to this problem is to elevate the level of critical discourse at the event. To do away with the festival’s stereotype as a superficial and warring cultural tour of exotic India, he reveals a new strategy: “I thought I’d sock them with Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha for a year.” The entry of postcolonial theory on the scene is precisely how the festival staged itself in 2013. Aside from Mahasweta Devi’s keynote, there were proper literary critics of difference in attendance who might situate the event itself as a version apart from its ready stereotype. Ironically, immediately following Spivak’s panel, which was widely praised as well as dismissed, Spivak in an interview relayed her experience of the exercise thus: “I have never sat in a panel where no one [from the audience] asked me a single question.” The failure that Spivak’s comment points to is not about the failure of literary critics such as Spivak and Bhabha to communicate meaningfully about postcolonial literature. Rather, this attempt by the organizers to counterpose proper criticism to popular ones of the festival misses the main problem that haunts it. The variously articulated, often conflicting stereotypical idioms through which South Asia becomes legible in artistic work may be deliberately given to opacity and estrangement. The ethical considerations produced by the alienation effects of stereotypes, in other words, need to be thought beyond what may be hashed out in public conferences even in the presence of revered critics. Hence, the kinds of passionate disagreements that the staging of literary culture in Jaipur has provoked suggest that there are crevasses that cannot be traversed by the artifice of a quick theoretical fix. The festival as stereotype, in other words, conjures phantasms about South Asia whose ghosts cannot easily be laid to rest.

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What vision of the global south prevails in our encounters with art— specifically narrative art—that turns on cultural stereotypes? This is the main question that motivates the substance of In Stereotype. As the example of the festival shows, stereotypes of uneven global development circulate freely in global literary texts and contexts alike. They provoke disputes that stem from well-known narratives about civilizational backwardness and progress, about the world divided into dangerous and safe zones. The prevalence of such stereotypes in contemporary literary texts, however, also reflects the vexed position of readers caught in their thickness. They compel consumers of the global novel to confront a set of ethical questions: How does my presence as a reader involve me in these storied images of suffering elsewhere in the world? What attention do these novels call to us as voyeurs into life-worlds mediated by stereotypes? How do representations about the lives of others conjoin phantasmic ideas about cultural otherness with life as it is lived by real people, in real places? Moreover, what kind of an ethical web do portraits of ruptured communities and disavowed lives construct in which we find ourselves so tangled? For as readers must often admit, repelled as they may be with narrative stereotypes, they are often oddly moved by them. It is why global novels about other worlds continue to endure and allure. The encounters between readers and texts, however, always remain singular. Each act of scrutiny remands viewers as individual, meaning-producing witnesses called on to relate to shifting yet set representations influenced by their own singularly differing subjectivities, their sense of self as affective and social beings, their racial, cultural, and gender identifications. This is to say, the most salient understanding about narrative stereotypes may well be that while they seem to project certitudes about the lives of others, they are actually equally about us. These texts offer insight about how stereotypes circulate to mediate the enigma of relations between “self ” and “other,” to gesture to ways in which our ideas of otherness are ultimately reflections of how we see ourselves. Hence, our encounters with stereotypes of otherness, this book suggests, is very much about an apprehension of how we see ourselves placed in the world. The debates about literary culture that swirl around Jaipur, and contemporary fictions about South Asia require that we read these fictions with an insertion of ourselves between the frames. As millennial readers

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and consumers of the global novel, we are caught, it seems to me, between competing narrative frames, incongruous chains of signification that force us to contemplate our own truth systems. In each instance, participants and readers must contend with what is being conveyed. Is it that globalized India is draconian and corrupt, in need of desperate reform? That national kinship ties, including all possibility for communal loyalty and love, is undone by squabbles over private property and transnationalized identities? That a brutal discommoning of shared inheritances is under way in India? That life itself is made illegible and unimportant by such conflicts? Or, quite conversely, is it to confront us with the knowledge that narratives of cultural difference are always replete with obdurate and inscrutable stereotypes? The extent to which we commit to one or other interpretive view reflects the extent to which we believe that hyperreal and obviously constructed narratives such as those presented in fiction emit some form of truth. That there is a veracity to them that irreducibly links the representational to the real. That they communicate something more than can be gleaned from seeing them merely as artistic arrangements conditioned by the point of view of a singular artist. That the worlding of stereotypes in this art, however problematic or predictable, also exceptionally reveals our vision, hopes, fears, and fantasies about the world that we inhabit. The reason I bring up the literary festival as prologue is to highlight the provocations around literary stereotyping that it offers—provocations that In Stereotype will attempt to address. I extend here the following theses about stereotypes that this book unpacks: 1. Stereotypes in art or literature meld real and fantastic worlds. 2. Stereotypes are both formulaic (repeating the same) and wildly speculative (reproducing difference). 3. Stereotypes move us affectively through insistent repetitions. 4. Stereotypes may seem to be about others but are equally about us. 5. Stereotypes complicate the burden of meaning-making between text and reader, making the witness complicit in the histories that stereotypes signify.

1 WHY THE STEREOTYPE? WHY SOUTH ASIA? I had to think somehow of this “fantasmatic Asia” which mediated the stereotype of myself . . . —Gayatri Spivak, Other Asias

In Stereotype is a literary biography of stereotypes. In it I trace the fantastical global lives of commonplaces regarding South Asia in modern and contemporary writing and film from and about the Indian subcontinent. Hunger, crowdedness, filth, slums, death, migrant flight, outsourcing, terror: such phantasmic notions have affixed themselves to the imaginary topos of South Asia as naturalized dimensions of its representation. But why the stereotype? And what does it mean to present a “biography” of stereotypes? In Stereotype makes the argument that stereotypes have lives that, while anchored to reality, are also in other ways so fantastic that their scrutiny is urgent. To illuminate the stereotype is to trace the life of the places and peoples it captures. Further, it makes the case that what we read under the sign of “global literature” enlivens collective stereotypes about other worlds. These stereotypes circulate in and out of fiction, mystifying lifeworlds elsewhere in fetishistic form. The present book is an effort to demystify prevalent stereotypes that cohere ideas about India writ large on a world stage. Despite the deceptive simplicity of the term, the stereotype functions as a complex and shape-shifting discourse about fear and desire, power and responsibility, politics and history. Rather than excoriate stereotypes as fictions advancing unfounded prejudices, In Stereotype proposes that our entanglements with these stereotypes often serve to repurpose the ethical demands they make on

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us in relation to our place in the world. “One place to begin writing the history of a stereotype,” Jenny Sharpe advises, “is to show its emergence, retreat, revival, and transformation.” To take this counsel seriously, as this book does, is to realize that stereotypes, however flat or fictive, are not static. Indeed one of the purposes of In Stereotype is to address in a sustained way the persistent motility of the term in its theoretical incarnations as a kind of catch-all for the reflexive idioms of colonialism. Yet this book also enlists the etymological origins and technological resonances of the term to mobilize a more refined sense of the stereotype in the production of global culture. Derived from the Greek “stereos,” or solid, and “typos,” impression, stereotyping in its original sense referred to the use of cast metal plates that were employed for the printing of particularly in-demand works, which could then be reproduced in subsequent printings without the need for new typesetting. Like the closely related term “cliché,” stereotyping conflates technology and ideology even as it gives new lives to the places, populations, and objects it seeks to reify. An invention of modernity, the stereotype in turn gives us a compelling vocabulary for assessing the role of emergent technologies—the colonial novel, the international bestseller, the transnational film—in redirecting the material and psychic investments it augurs. To give shape to what is intrinsically shape-shifting, this book begins with an analysis of stereotypes about overpopulation and slums and culminates in a study of death, migrancy, and terror. Paradoxically, this trajectory may seem to “fix” a stereotypical master narrative about South Asia already prevalent in the global imaginary. But as this study shows, very rarely does any one novel, film, or work of art invoke only a singular stereotype. Stereotypes are fungible and relational; stereotypical portraits of crowds, for instance, gesture toward the presence of squatter colonies, insecure lives, migrant flight, and so on. Homi Bhabha makes a similar point when he writes that “as a form of splitting and multiple belief, the stereotype requires, for its successful signification, a continual and repetitive chain of other stereotypes.” More importantly, the open chain of stereotypical significations discloses the biocultural imprints of stereotyping as each seeps into the next on the basis of assumptions made about how life is lived in certain cultural milieus. In confronting the play of stereotypes in culturally “other” literary and artistic texts, this book borrows theoretical insights from biopolitical, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic thought.

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These theories, in general, have been formative for postcolonial studies. However, the task I undertake here is careful not to subsume postcolonial literary rendering of stereotypes under a hermeneutics of theoretical explanations. If, as Bhabha also suggests, stereotypes are always deeply “ambivalent” forms of cross-cultural “suture,” this study mobilizes an eclectic range of critical perspectives from biopolitics to cultural studies, affect psychology to feminist and queer studies, to grasp the sutures, vacillating meanings, and effects of cultural difference that stereotypes convey. Claiming that the stereotype is “an inveterate boundary crosser,” Rukmini Bhaya Nair makes the point that it “returns, succubus-like, at times of crisis, or shifts of perspective, in literary history.” In Stereotype makes an explicit claim for the relevance of the stereotype as a reflection of how we culturally relate to the most salient crises that arise in late modernity: poverty, pollution, population, political killings, transnational labor. “As process and practice, stereotyping,” Michael Pickering astutely notes, “is endemic to modernity.” Stereotypes in global novels make distorted generalizations but also reinvent our assumptions about how collective claims are articulated in our modern, globalized world. A STEREOTYPICAL MODERNITY AND THE CULTURE OF REPRODUCIBILITY

A term for reproducible printing, the stereotype is closely allied with the rise of print capitalism under modernity. Its provenance in technology influences its figurative sense in social, cultural, and literary contexts. At the time of its first invention in the early eighteenth century by Scottish goldsmith William Ged, the innovation went unnoticed and lay dormant for many years. Its resurgence came with its second invention by Scottish editor Alexander Tilloch, who, together with Andrew Foulis, printer of the University of Glasgow press, and later Lord Stanhope, inventor of the Stanhope press, popularized its use toward the beginning of the Victorian era. By the turn of the twentieth century, the stereotype was seen as an initially expensive but ultimately cost-, labor-, and timeefficient improvement upon the use of older block-printing methods or the moveable types that followed it. A technique in which a solid plate of metal type is first cast to expedite reproducibility, this type of printing relied on fixed metal molds rather than on moveable types.

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As histories of printing make clear, the emergence of stereotype technology facilitated accelerated approaches to how quickly, numerously, urgently, and indefinitely original copy could be multiplied and reproduced for very little expenditure. Additionally, stereotype printing, because it reproduced print from a fixed mold, gained renown for accurate reproductions without the kinds of errors seen in older print technologies where the type had to be set by hand every single time. Hence, stereotypes became associated with accuracy, the repetition of reliable form, and the certitude of mechanical reproduction devoid of human error. This kind of reproducibility also signaled an explosion of mass culture insofar as any book, journal, brochure, leaflet, newspaper, popular poster, or print trifle could now proliferate itself relatively cheaply. It is this confluence of associations between fixity, accuracy, and the possibility for the limitless reproduction of culture that have infiltrated how we understand stereotypes today in their idiomatic sense. The proliferation of stereotypes in cultural production, which is ultimately what this book is concerned with, retains characteristics borne of its genesis and success as a technological form even as it attains new force within popular discourse. The effective achievement of stereotypical printing was its capacity for accelerated mass reproduction of images and the printed word that, in terms of its valence for cultural production, signaled a unique kind of reproducibility as the very condition of modernity. The stereotype serves as the singular achievement and symptom of a modernity premised on greater and speedier reproduction of printed media and cultural forms. This reliance on the quick regeneration of mass cultural forms enabled by the technology of the stereotype in the history of the print raises important questions about what it meant to be culturally modern in these terms. Coincidental with the rise of the nation-state and Britain’s imperial stature in the world, stereotypical reproduction in the context of British colonialism heralded the arrival of a modernity in which questions of cultural authenticity and originality were continually tested and supplanted. Benedict Anderson has argued that “the convergence of capitalism and print technology . . . created the possibility of a new form of imagined community” that anticipated the formation of the “modern nation.” We might think of the innovations brought about by stereotype technology within print culture in an analogous way insofar as it

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modulated questions of cultural identity across British colonial borders. The swiftness with which processes of print stereotype in turn spread cultural stereotypes between various colonial locations arguably inaugurated an empire sensibility about global cultural differences that is still with us. Mass reproducibility yoked to stereotypical reprinting muddied distinctions between original and derivative cultural forms, as well as their fixity and malleability to challenge the “aura” of any original work of art in the sense described by Walter Benjamin. The condition of being modern was mediated through the stereotype as a technical and cultural process in which the distinctiveness between model and copy, traditional form and innovation, provenance and substitution, dissolved. “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Benjamin asserts, “is the aura of the art work.” Although he refers explicitly to the rise of photographic and filmic reproduction, one might extend Benjamin’s insight to the way in which the advent of stereotypical form invigorated modernity’s turn away from what Benjamin identifies as a unique proximity between tradition and original works of art that lend them their authenticity. Benjamin argues that mechanical reproduction replaces the “cult” or “ritual” value of original works of art with the emergence of a “collective” experience of art that is contingent on a wholly modern perceptual, political, and cultural view of the “transitoriness and reproducibility” of all forms of representation. At its heart, stereotypical reproducibility is coextensive with modern technology’s capacity to question the authentic singularity of representational forms. Stereotypes accrue value for their swift and mechanical duplication of originals that leads to a new and, according to Benjamin, decidedly modern sense of how quickly and capaciously art forms can be transmitted, consumed, and remade to weigh on previously unforeseen contexts. Because stereotypes are particularly aligned with the emergence of modern mechanicity, some of the paradoxes of modernity also attend peculiarly to them. As a challenge to the “aura” of the old, stereographs diffused claims to authenticity of prior cultural traditions by disrupting their temporal uniqueness, reinventing their historical relevance, transporting contexts, and infusing them with new symbolic value. At the same time, stereotypical print was also girded to notions of fixity and form, accuracy, and repetition as the essential tools for reproducing cultural forms. That this form of reproducibility was capable of generating

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certain texts on a massive scale lent it the capacity to advance ideological programs and disseminate dominant opinions on an unparalleled scale. But the very fact that this mode of reproduction turned on the sheer force of volume—its immense capacity to mass produce forms of representation for general consumption—also meant that a degree of doubt or uncertainty about the authority, singularity, or truth value of any particular cultural text became endemic to it. The fear was that incessant stereotypic repetition conveyed no meaning and was empty of nuance beyond what was useful to the lowest common denominator. Not insignificantly, “stereotypy” in the early twentieth century came to describe a pathological psychological condition, a type of “insanity” given to fixated and endless repetitions of words and actions in the absence of any clearly discernible sense or goals. So even as the power of stereotypical form materialized through incessant reproducibility, its tenuous displacement of the value and meaning of the original work reflected anxieties over questions of authenticity and use that govern modernity itself. WHY STEREOTYPE: SOME ANSWERS FROM COGNITIVE SCIENCE

While stereotypes are a form of cultural reproduction tied originally to technological progress, they have since become powerfully mundane ways of describing the conventionality of attitudes we express in our daily lives. Indeed, the most common understanding of the stereotype is that it conveys formulaic ideas based on ill-formed biases about persons or groups typically other to ourselves. To stereotype in this sense is taken at once to further a widespread prejudice, to reduce the complexities of difference to gross oversimplification, and, in most cases, to participate in regulating the norms of belonging to this or that culture. In fact, the commonplace that stereotypes are merely, as W. J. T. Mitchell observes, “bad, false images that prevent us from truly seeing other people,” or what may be otherwise thought of as “cognitive templates of prejudice,” makes the problem posed by them seem deceptively simple. After all, don’t we all already know what a stereotype is, and don’t we assume stereotyping as almost a given? Especially in the context of scholarly postcolonial interventions, haven’t we been considering stereotypes all along? Take, for instance, Edward Said’s seminal text, Orientalism. Isn’t it

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first and foremost a study of stereotypes governing the relations between the Occident and Orient? Frantz Fanon’s startling treatise identifying the violence attendant on his being singled out for his blackness (“Look, A Negro!) is surely also about the psychological trauma of racial stereotyping. This may well be the case, but the point is that the ubiquity of stereotypes has strangely foreclosed their direct analysis. Even while Said and Fanon are implicitly assumed to be addressing colonialist tendencies of stereotyping, there is little explicit reference in these influential texts themselves, or in the scholarship about them, to reflect on the presence and force of the practices of stereotyping that dictate our premises about what these works accomplish. Within the disciplines of cognitive social psychology, where it has been most extensively addressed, the stereotype is associated with repeat pattern behaviors, standardized or stock language use, recurrent xenophobia, and stabilized racial and gender attitudes. As Jorg Schweinitz observes in his excellent study of stereotypes in film, “The stereotype, usually described as ‘standard,’ was considered the absolute opposite of positive critical terms such as ‘artistic,’ ‘creative,’ ‘nuanced,’ ‘true,’ ‘individual,’ or ‘original.’” This book works past such a Manichean approach to thinking about the stereotype as a potentially productive aspect of global literature. Literary stereotypes in global fiction, as In Stereotype shows, call attention in creative ways to our intersubjective cultural investments as well as our access to the privileges and pitfalls of globalization. First, it is important to highlight the nexus of concerns that have so far conditioned our thinking on stereotypes. Within discourses of social psychology, Schweinitz shows that the work of Daniel Katz and Kenneth Braly on racial stereotypes in the 1930s was instrumental in conceiving of stereotyping as a cultural form given to “normative ideas, attitudes, or expectations” about people based on “warped, malicious, or pathological” judgments that had little basis in fact. The psychologist Gordon Allport likewise aligns stereotypes with prejudice, writing that a stereotype is “an exaggerated belief associated with a category. Its function is to justify (rationalize) our conduct in relation to that category.” Such early sociopsychological studies of stereotypes importantly demonstrate that stereotypes are mental constructs that are largely fictive. Stereotypical fictions about other people and societies appear as categorical truth claims largely unsupported by fact to “stabilize” reductive ideas about otherness,

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invoke strong emotional responses (what the psychological literature on stereotyping describes as “affective coloration”), and produce communities of “consensus” and “conformity” through the active use of “clichés.” These conclusions of the social sciences confirm stereotypes as mainly pejorative devices aligned with the segregationist attitudes prevailing in the United States at the time. Schweinitz identifies psychologist Adam Schaff as key to linking stereotypical thought to “mass psychology.” Schaff advanced the claim that the masses were particularly “susceptible” to the kinds of unexamined generalizations that formed the bases of stereotypes about others. Michael Pickering has observed that crucial to critiques of stereotyping is to examine “how stereotypes relate to conceptions of what is held to be ‘natural’ or normal” for the sake of “normative gain” that depends on principles of exclusion. Thus, social psychological studies of stereotyping have tended to focus on stereotyping as the normative transmission of fixed forms or cognitive categories reflective of homogenous ideas about others. More lately, Henri Tajfel has pioneered social studies of group stereotyping that supplemented “descriptive,” content-oriented studies of specific societal types and the analysis of individual tendencies, both of which Tajfel considered insufficiently attentive to the “intergroup” or “shared” dynamics of stereotypy. “Stereotypes,” Tajfel argues “become social only when they are shared by large numbers of people within social groups or entities—the sharing implying a process of effective diffusion.” While these studies were geared toward examining and disabling the prejudicial myths found in racial and cultural stereotypes, they are also useful in pinpointing certain qualities about stereotypes that are still operative today in how we approach and enter into the protocols of stereotypes in global fiction. Cognitive psychologists lay the groundwork that shows how stereotypes tap into collective imaginaries about social belonging, and how terms of exclusion and inclusion are negotiated on the basis of commonly perceived cultural norms. The notion that stereotypes are propelled by fictive ideas that seek a corresponding reality to affirm and anchor their evaluations heightens the urgency for why we must consider their activation in our present-day popular fictions about the world. Stereotypes may be read as indices of popular ideations about worlds to which we both belong, and to those that are far removed

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from us. Stereotypes, it could be said, mediate our imaginative fictions about ourselves; they condition our affective ties to our communities, languages, cultures, and national identities. As before, it is useful to turn to Benedict Anderson’s assertion that the nation itself is constituted as an “imagined political community  .  .  . imagined as both limited and sovereign.” Cultural stereotypes remain formative to how such communities, both national and global, are imagined and delimited. As the social psychologists who have analyzed them argue, stereotypes manage our anxieties about how difference is experienced and arranged in the world, and for this reason alone it is imperative that we take a closer look at their prevalence in our imaginative texts. The affective responses that stereotypes about global difference and likeness provoke form the shifting bases for how the “deep, horizontal comradeship” that Anderson posits as the basis of our sense of community, national and otherwise, is articulated. STEREOTYPES, CULTURE, AND THE ORDERING OF THE WORLD

One of the earliest and most influential treatises on the stereotype is a book called Public Opinion published in 1922 by American journalist Walter Lippmann. Lippmann’s exploration of stereotypes draws largely on pragmatist John Dewey’s ideas on “reflective thinking,” as outlined in How We Think (1910), to make the case that stereotypes are endemic to how we inhabit culture. Contrary to social psychologists who view stereotypical thought as advancing divisive social prejudices, Lippmann makes the case that stereotypes are essential for delineating the mental pictures we form of ourselves in relation to the world. Stereotypes, Lippmann argues, are primarily visual metaphors, the “pictures in our heads,” that we use to classify the world in recognizable ways prior to “the use of reason.” In laying the groundwork for stereotypes as integral to our perceptual connection to the world, Lippmann inaugurates a theory about the stereotype’s centrality to cultural identity that has some salience even today. He argues that stereotypes are not exceptional but ordinary figures that insinuate themselves into everyday “habits of simple apprehension” that we use to lend “definiteness and distinction,” “consistency and stability” to an otherwise chaotic world. A stereotype’s

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ability to confer order on a messy world is why, according to Lippmann, it forms the crux of our cultural identifications: “In the great, blooming buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.” Lippmann thus sees stereotypes as exemplary for how individual subjective experiences of the world gain coherence from dominant cultural formations. Among other things, stereotypes, he claims, gain currency from our quotidian practices—the languages we speak, the food we consume, the clothes we wear—as well as our national allegiances. What is most notable about Lippmann’s postulates is that he sees stereotypes as both necessary (“the abandonment of all stereotypes . . . would impoverish human life”) and mutable. We must be willing, he writes, to “know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly.” Lippmann’s deep pragmatism dictates that we see stereotypes as banal, extrarational, and essentially harmless projections of our cultural attitudes that may be easily altered. However, the more he argues for their integral place in our cultural imaginaries, the more impervious they seem to change. As conduits of “our moral codes, our social philosophies, and our political agitations,” stereotypes, Lippmann acknowledges, evoke strong affective defenses. “The stereotypes are,” Lippmann admits, “highly charged with the feelings attached to them. They are the fortress of our traditions, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy.” That is to say, stereotypes emerge as the bulwark of cultural values, signifying “the projection upon the world of our own values, our own positions, and our own rights.” The metaphor of the “fortress” conveys the sense that stereotypes define cultural boundaries and consolidate the psychic and material investments of belonging to a culture. As Richard Dyer puts it, “The most important function of stereotypes [is] to maintain sharp boundary definitions, to define clearly where the pale ends and thus who is clearly within and who is clearly beyond it.” In short, stereotypes are a measure of our cultural politics. If, according to Dyer, “the effectiveness of stereotypes resides in the way they invoke consensus,” any disruption of a stereotype would unleash the kind of “charged feelings” that go into securing such a consensus or constructing boundaries in the first place. So, although Lippmann calls for the need

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to relinquish stereotypes when necessary, he and others recognize their ubiquity within any culture. It could be said, in fact, that stereotypes form the building blocks of culture itself, shoring up its normative firmaments and regulating its conventions. Lippmann certainly advances this view, writing, “No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe.” The prevalence of stereotypes along with their tendency toward fixity and order that Lippmann points to suggest that ultimately stereotypes are about consolidating cultural power. In Stereotype assumes this as a precondition in its analysis of global stereotypes about South Asia. “It is strategically and theoretically more useful,” Mireille Rosello remarks, “to imagine stereotypes as . . . endowed with power and to determine where this power comes from.” The path this book charts in tracing seemingly immutable stereotypes that define the cultural life of South Asia and marking the ways in which they are sometimes contested, shattered, or reformulated toward different political or epistemological ends is ultimately about tracking shifting discourses of power. Insofar as stereotypes are about the preservation, production, and proliferation of cultural knowledge, they are as much about how cultural knowledge is adopted through processes of globalization into new equations for the control and management of difference. Stereotypes about South Asia vacillate between the seemly and unruly subjects of globalization, where the former are favorably looked upon, and the latter, demonized. One has only to think about the institutional hospitality accorded to technology immigrants and the humor with which outsourcing experiments are seen compared to the furor over supposedly inassimilable refugees and asylum seekers to gauge the difference. Cultural norms are rationalized in Weberian terms such that conflict between groups resound in the degree of access or violence each group experiences in relation to nexuses of power—of the state, the legal-juridical apparatus, corporations, and other social institutions. Stereotypes function in such cases not as purely subjective modes of situating ourselves individually in relation to larger cultural norms but also as expressions of our collective phantasms. In a short exploration of the state of cultural studies in negotiating these concerns, Fredric Jameson identifies the stereotype as a lynchpin that mediates what he calls the “group libido” of cultural geopolitics.

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Jameson argues that “culture must . . . always be seen as a vehicle or a medium whereby the relationship between groups is transacted.” In our current circumstance given over to a U.S.-dominated global capitalism, the stereotype, Jameson maintains, remains “inevitable” in registering struggles of and against dominance, and in marking the kinds of “abstractions” available to domineering and insubordinate group identities. Jameson writes: The relations between groups are always stereotypical insofar as they must involve collective abstractions of the other group, no matter how sanitized. . . . The stereotype is indeed the place of an illicit surplus of meaning, what Barthes called the “nausea” of mythologies: it is an abstraction by virtue of which my individuality is allegorized and turned into an abusive illustration of something else, something nonconcrete and nonindividual.

Here Jameson reforms Lippmann’s earlier conflation of the stereotype with cultural identity to a radical degree to suggest that the appearance of stereotypes evacuates subjectivity entirely, replacing it with a kind of collective identification always in excess of individual, subjective attachment. The example of the Jaipur Literature Festival with which I began this book evokes this sense of a slide into collective identifications in which our concrete subjective selves seem to disappear into the force of collective abstractions about certain groups that Jameson highlights and these staged events tap into. As such, the collectivity of “South Asia” that In Stereotype designates emanates from an understanding that this is loosely a cultural group in the manner described by Jameson that is constituted through a “surplus of illicit meanings,” which is to say, a set of stereotypical abstractions about its location, politics, aesthetics, and presence as an entity in the world. Our encounters with stereotypes of South Asia more often than not are indicative of how we find ourselves extended in nonconcrete ways into collective allegories that materially disrupt our unique self-identities, reorienting them instead into how cultural difference is experienced as an integral part of a global difference. Moreover, these encounters with stereotypical portraits of South Asia that appear in global texts, whether photographs, film, or literature, are about the accumulation of cultural capital. Pierre Bourdieu has written of the global

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factor of cultural codes that he claims are produced to translate knowledge between cultures. Bourdieu writes that all cultural consumption is based on “an act of cognition, a decoding operation, which implies the implementation of a cognitive acquirement, a cultural code.” Global texts that peddle in stereotypes are seminal to the production of such a cultural code. The degree and manner in which we assimilate these texts to our view of the world is indicative of an aesthetics of globalization, the transformation of cognitive knowledge about the world into ideas of how we see ourselves mirrored in it, as well as a reflection of our “educated” tastes and judgments. THE UNAESTHETIC STEREOTYPE AND THE DEAD ENDS OF LANGUAGE

While cultural theorists and cognitive psychologists addressed stereotypes as an attribute of social identity politics, literary critics began by contemplating the semiotic significance of stereotypes. Narrative theorists such as Gérard Genette, Michael Riffaterre, Roland Barthes, and others, as Schweinitz has shown, write of literary stereotypes as stylistic devices evidenced in the appearance of stable lexemes, adages, idiomatic or platitudinous phrases, iterative schemes, and clichés. The initial study of stereotypes in literary texts has thus been preoccupied by concerns over their aesthetic rather than social or political role. Structuralists who were concerned with how language works as a sign system signifying established codes and inaugurating new ones generally took stereotypes to denote fixed linguistic codifications. As elements of style, stereotypes were seen as “characterized by iterativity . . . identified as cases of repetition gone crazy, as a disease of the same, of the always already said.” Thus, in general, as aesthetic aspects of language, stereotypes were maligned for lacking stylistic innovation and for advancing in its place all-too-ready and leaden banalities. For Genette, the most distinctive feature of the stereotype is its monotonous repetition of “recurrent phrases,” which he sees in Homer’s prose as a form of self-citation or “Homerism.” In his discussion of pastiche and parody in Balzac, Genette writes similarly of the “iterative state of a stereotype” as “a stylistic tic.” He judges this “category of idiomatic locutions” that he finds “scattered and diversified all over . . . the text” as a form of pastiche, which he labels

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“Balzacism.” These predictable repetitions signify for him a self-referential stylistic flattening, a literal imitation that stereotypical prose in the form of pastiche accomplishes with none of the experimentation or brilliance implied by parody, which aspires to unexpected forms of imitation directed toward novel interpretations. Stylistically, then, the stereotype, according to Genette, allows little by way of newness or difference to enter into a text, but he nonetheless recognizes that its one saving grace is that it sometimes produces the aesthetic horizon by which an author’s style, voice, historical location, and formal vision become recognizable. Likening the stereotype to a cliché, Riffaterre takes a somewhat more favorable approach to its function in literature. Clichés, Riffaterre insists, are natural and not always prosaic. They reflect the functionality of language. “Even if the cliché is always a stereotype, it is not always banal; one perceives it as such when originality is currently in fashion as an aesthetic criteria; at other times it is categorized as the Gradus ad Parnassum and recommended as ‘pleasant phrase,’ ‘natural adjective,’ etc.” In Riffaterre’s analysis, clichés retain a universality that is necessary to language use and must not be judged for their adversity to originality, a trait he deems definitionally exterior to them. In terms of their aesthetic value, it is Roland Barthes who is unflinchingly critical of the use of stereotypes. “The stereotype,” Barthes writes, “can be evaluated in terms of fatigue. . . . The stereotype is what begins to fatigue me.” For Barthes, the stereotype remains a sign that signifies nothing other than a shrill “insistence” of the petrifaction, even death, of language. It is a form of linguistic stasis that kills all pleasure in a text, signifying only an endless ennui: “The stereotype is the word repeated without any magic, any enthusiasm, as though it were natural, as though by some miracle this recurring word were adequate on each occasion for different reasons, as though to imitate could no longer be sensed as an imitation: an unconstrained word that claims consistency and is unaware of its own insistence.” What is so interesting about Barthes’s indictment of the stereotype is his simultaneous recognition that it is both a frozen dimension of language and an “unconstrained” one. The stereotype’s capacity to fix language in seemingly natural, even habituated ways, to imitate without calling attention to the mimetic moment, is what shapes its power. This is also what propels Barthes to see it as a threat to the liveliness of language itself, a kind of impossible paralysis that can only be described as

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malaise inducing. “The distrust of stereotype (linked to the bliss of the new word or the untenable discourse) is a principle of absolute instability which respects nothing. . . . Nausea occurs whenever the liaison of two important words follows itself. The stereotype is this nauseating impossibility of dying.” The gamut of feelings engendered in Barthes by the stereotype—from fatigue, to nausea, to fear of death—is provocative because it brings to the fore key features of the force of stereotypes in language: stereotypes are everywhere present in language, they have a congealing effect, and this effect is largely untamable. “The signs from which language is made,” Barthes, the ever-consummate structuralist, tells us, “only exist in so far as they repeat themselves. Signs follow the herd; they are gregarious. Within each sign lurks the monster of the stereotype. I can never say anything without gathering up everything that language pulls along (ce qui traine dans la langue).” It seems that the problem with stereotypes, the trait that gives them their capacity to make all representation grotesque or monstrous, is their hyperperfection as signs. Stereotypes uniquely replicate the imitative and signifying chains of language in such constant and prolific ways as to potentially strangle the vital goals of representation that seek also to renew originality, pleasure, sociality, beauty, unexpectedness, etc. Yet, as this book shows, neither cultural norms nor aesthetic forms are timeless. Even as they appear stable in certain contexts, stereotypes, like all social and representational forms, are given to change, eliciting in the wake of their transformations previously unanticipated damages and alliances. In his substantial study of literary stereotypes, Difference and Pathology, Sander Gilman melds together the insights offered by cultural and linguistic theorists to present a psychoanalytic paradigm for thinking about the worth of stereotypes. Language, Gilman notes, as do Barthes and the others, is predisposed to stereotyping: “The closed world of language, a system of references which creates the illusion of completeness and wholeness, carries and is carried by the need to stereotype.” Because we all are worlded through language, it follows for Gilman that all humans participate in stereotyping (“Everyone creates stereotypes. We cannot function in the world without them”), and moreover, that this tendency to stereotype is indicative of our psychic individuations. “The creation of stereotypes,” Gilman writes, “is concomitant of the process by which all human beings become individuals.

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Its beginnings lie in the earliest stages of our development.” Gilman’s thesis that stereotypes are “necessary” aspects of every individual’s sense of self resonates with Jameson’s claim that they are “inevitable” social constructs. Where these two differ is in Gilman’s insistence that stereotypes are formed as a response to every infant’s anxious entry into the world. In an effort to move from the imaginary to the symbolic field, Gilman proposes that infants parse the world in “bipolar” ways into “good” and “bad” representations to create a sense of difference between the self and the object, or the Other. For Gilman, as Pickering observes, stereotypes originate from a questionable theory of “infantile determinism” that continues to guide mature attitudes. In this account, stereotypes emerge as “a crude sense of mental representations of the world” formed in our nascent psyches. Gilman argues that the locus of stereotypic cognition depends on innate early-life susceptibilities that have resounding implications for how much stereotypes that are formed prior to language acquisition guide our later orientations to the world, at times sedimenting into generic civilizational postures. “Stereotypes,” Gilman asserts, “can assume a life of their own, rooted not in reality but in the mythmaking made necessary by our need to control our world. Stereotyping is clearly in evidence in every civilization of which we have records.” Gilman’s thesis on stereotypes paradoxically holds that stereotypes make myths that arise from universally conceived positive or negative infant perceptions at the same time that they are subject to and inform entirely distinct cultural dispensations. While this explanation of the “deep structure of the stereotype” is tantalizing as a portrait of how our psychic proclivities may contend with the anxieties of confronting difference in the world, it does not offer a larger picture about what conditions us culturally and socially to hold fast to certain stereotypes and to reject or interrogate others. In this book I am concerned more with the formation, circulation, and even recombination of stereotypes about a particular culture—South Asia—as they gain purchase on a global scale. Do stereotypes about South Asia participate in certain psychic and social ideas we have about how the world itself is arranged? How do the imaginative “mental pictures” we have of a culture get formed in and through the texts we consume? My thesis that stereotypes create as well as convey the lifeworlds of a particular

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place and peoples is contingent on thinking about the intersections of historical, cultural, and imaginative narratives that condition shifting notions about how collective identifications take shape in the postcolonial world. After all, as Rey Chow persuasively argues, “stereotypes are capable of engendering realties that do not exist.” Gilman’s most useful contribution to this project is in his framing of the “protean” quality of stereotypes. “Thus paradigm shifts in our mental representations of the world can and do occur. We can move from fearing to glorifying the Other,” Gilman writes. “We can move from loving to hating. The most negative stereotype always has an overtly positive counterweight. As any image is shifted, all stereotypes shift. Thus stereotypes are inherently protean rather than rigid.” Although Gilman maintains that shifts in how we see specific stereotypes from one moment to the next are guided most exclusively by our “internal” selves, they in fact arguably occur in response to larger social and historical questions that implicate our ideas of self and otherness in relation to larger geopolitical arrangements. THE POSTCOLONIAL FETISH, REMAKING OURSELVES IN STEREOTYPE

The critical itineraries of the stereotype that I elaborate on here—its invention in modernity, its sociological, cultural, linguistic, and literaryhistorical genealogy—show why thinking about collective subjectivities in a global context necessitates delving into fictional stereotypes. As each of the book’s chapters demonstrate, the stereotype in global fictions about South Asia is a cultural prosthetic that, like a fetish, obscures by reanimating the material and the psychic investments it engenders. In other words, as much as the stereotypes themselves, our relationship with the fetish aspect of stereotypes that appear in global fictions confers them value. It is important to emphasize that within postcolonial studies, the stereotype—though less thought of—has nevertheless accrued political charge. This is the result of an awareness in postcolonial thinking that stereotypes typically function on multiple levels: signifying the machinic break between the modern and the premodern while influencing how cultural difference is promulgated in and through language, which in turn carves the world hierarchically. Stereotypic mimesis, as Rey Chow

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writes, is thus “an existential as well as representational issue” in colonial contexts. This interrelation between identity, language, and culture is what postcolonial scholars who have worked on cultural stereotypes typically recognize. For instance, Edward Said notably claims that the “stereotype” is one of the “lenses” of Orientalism. Said’s path-breaking study, Orientalism (1978), inaugurated postcolonial scholarly attention on how to think of East–West cultural relations after the decline of imperial Europe in aggregate terms that still acknowledges the legacies of this history. Said established that Orientalism is about the construction of knowledge archives just as much as it is concerned with terms of representation, identity, and governance of the Orient. The lasting impact of Orientalism as a study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imaginative geographies and typologies of the East that flourished in colonial metropolitan accounts is how durable they remain in the present: “One aspect of the electronic, postmodern,” Said writes, “is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed. . . . So far as the Orient is concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified the hold of the nineteenth century academic and imaginative demonology of ‘the mysterious Orient.’” So, although Said’s study is not explicitly about the play of stereotypes per se, it remains germane for thinking about how colonial discourse analysis dealt with colonial difference—in material, doctrinal, representational, and existential terms—in ways that still endure. The scope and influence of Orientalism, inclusive of how knowledge about the East is disciplined in the West (through revised histories, travelogues, novels, edited compilations, and translations of classical works from the non-West, for example) and used to subdue colonized others to imperial interests, is notable in Said’s account for several reasons not often mentioned in discussions of this work. The first is that Orientalist discourse—dependent as it is on cultural stereotypes that reinforce geopolitical hierarchies of colonial power—is also in Said’s view about “discern[ing] the intimate, perhaps even the most intimate, and rich relationship between the Occident and Orient.” Which is to say, the cumulative corporate interests of Orientalism evinced by military, public, and social institutions that structured different economies of ascendancy and dependence for the West and East bespeak latent desires and fantasies that are less stable than the binaristically opposed geographic categories

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of Orient and Occident allow. This notion, that the Occident is formed through an estranged intimacy with the Orient, is a point embedded in Said’s analysis that Homi Bhabha takes up more fully in his theory of colonial stereotyping. The second idea in Orientalism, one that forms the basis of Said’s subsequent explorations of literary texts in Cultural and Imperialism (1993), is that “Orientalism is a school of interpretation . . . conditioned by the fact that its truths, like any truths delivered by language, are embodied in language and what is the truth of language.” As others have written, Said draws extensively from Foucault and Nietzsche to develop the notion that colonial relations were discursively produced through “mobile armies of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms” that, when congealed as factual knowledge, obscured the illusory basis of their truth claims. Said’s main point here is that the “political doctrine” or “system of truths” that formed the basis of positivist claims made by Orientalism was primarily textual and reliant on interpretive exercises. Thus, “Orientalism as a body of ideas, beliefs, clichés, and learning about the East”—in short, stereotypes about the Orient—exists in relation to representation. It is this Saidian notion—that all cultural relations proceed through representation outlined as stereotypes whose meaning may only be derived through interpretive arrangements—that remains most valuable to any thinking about stereotypes that follows after Said. The other question that may be asked about the representational effect of stereotypes in literature or film on real-world ethical quandaries is whether fictive worlds have much to do with how cultures collectively signify outside of their imagined contexts. Here, too, Said is a forerunner in claiming as he does in The World, the Text, and the Critic a correspondence between representational texts and social worlds. “My position,” Said announced, “is that texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.” The ethical dilemmas that literary stereotypes pose arise precisely because these stereotypes circulate in world and text simultaneously in the manner Said suggests. One might say that Said’s idea of textual worldliness has been indispensable to the ways in which postcolonial scholarly work has sought connections between representational politics and realpolitik. It is worth noting that

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the worldliness Said attributes to texts, and I to stereotypes, involves an interpretive engagement with the text that is “more complicated,” as he puts it, than “the private process of reading.” As will become evident over the course of this book’s chapters, stereotypes in global fictions confront us with the task of reading ethically, an exercise that involves making decisions about whether to become the particular kind of interested or disaffected reader that the narratives themselves motivate us to either identify with or disown. More directly than Said, Homi Bhabha has addressed the stereotype’s role in colonial representation, influentially advocating for “understanding . . . the processes of subjectification made possible through stereotypical discourse.” In other words, for Bhabha, stereotypical discourse is always already about the enunciation of power through representation. Stereotypes about South Asia that we encounter in global narratives force us to define ourselves as consumers of these texts. That is, even as stereotypes provoke us to imagine South Asia’s remarkable differences, they also reveal ourselves to us, and at times remake us. As Spivak so aptly puts it, the “fantasmatic Asias” we confront in fiction mediate stereotypes of ourselves even as they extend images of another place or people. Seeing the stereotype as something that involves us intimately in it means recognizing its ethical force. The stereotype, as both Sander Gilman and Rey Chow argue, is what makes us come face to face with the other. It also means acknowledging up front that an attempt to pierce its significations, to read stereotypes for cultural nuance, is about a particular reader’s access to, entry into, and reaction to a given text. A postcolonial biography of stereotypes such as this one is also as much about the undoubtedly political nature of the “processes of subjectification” and subjection that the lived worlds invoked by stereotypes record. As Richard Dyer acutely reminds us, it is not “stereotypes, as an aspect of human thought and representation, that are wrong, but who controls and defines them, what interests they serve.” In “The Other Question” Bhabha forwards a theory about “stereotypeas-suture” that elaborates on the stereotype’s importance to colonial discourse. One might even say that the many other influential theories of ambivalence, such as that of mimicry and hybridity, that he identifies as part of the cultural matrix of colonial relations assumes the play of stereotypical discourse at their kernel. The compliant as well as subversive

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capacities of colonial mimicry, for instance, are yoked to “ambivalence” and “indeterminacy” in a way similar to the stereotype. The practice of mimicry within colonial societies mocks colonial power even as it emulates it in much the same way that cultural stereotypes reveal dominant biases even while forwarding them. The mimic in colonial circumstance is both the locus of cultural regulation—inscribing the colonial norm— and the site of an unpredictable disruption or recalcitrance against that norm. The stereotype, likewise, is also the sign of such a “double articulation,” one that conditions how practices of mimicry proceed on the basis of some stereotypical assumptions made about cultures thought to be radically different from one another. Moreover, stereotypical discourse “inscribes a form of governmentality” that reveals the strange codependencies of colonial life. For Bhabha the stereotype is a juncture point imbued with material and psychic characteristics that uncertainly represent differences between colonizing and colonized cultures. Accordingly, the stereotype dominates the empire of signs that produces colonial difference because of its ability to ascribe “origin and identity” while keeping open its range of representational significations. The stereotype seems able to articulate colonial difference precisely because its discursive tactic proceeds by way of “fixity” (denoting what is always “in place”) as well as magnifications and repetitions that are in excess of that which appears fixed. Hence, colonial cultures are caught in the “ambivalence” of stereotypical articulations where all ascriptions of cultural attributes are cast in type as they veer toward fantastical repetition. Stereotypes are thus constative, alerting us to the real. Stereotypical colonial discourse, Bhabha reminds us, “produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible. It resembles a form of narrative whereby the productivity and circulation of subjects and signs are bound in a reformed and recognizable totality. It employs a system of representation, a regime of truth, that is structurally similar to realism.” The stereotype’s constative ability to conjure the real, however, is also its limit, the threshold of its slide into fiction. Given to iteration, stereotypes tend toward an endless chain of signification that relies on metaphoric substitution to produce meaning. “As a form of splitting and multiple belief,” Bhabha writes, “the stereotype requires, for its successful signification, a continual and repetitive chain of other stereotypes.” This elusive

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quality of the stereotype that allows it to remain mysteriously suggestive while signifying beyond itself is, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, its most “effective” trait. “The stereotype,” Mitchell writes in the context of racial film imagery, “is most effective . . . when it remains unseen, unconscious, disavowed, a lurking suspicion always waiting to be confirmed by a fresh perception.” Much as it may gesture to the constitution of cultural realities or cultural tendencies, the stereotype is nothing more than a chimera of the real and, as such, contains no key to its diegesis. It proceeds instead, as Bhabha observes, by way of “anxious” repetition toward the assertion of a precarious and performative set of cultural relations that reveals more about the exertions of cultural power than the actuality of cultural difference. The excitable enunciation of savagery, lust, anarchy, lasciviousness, and indolence—stereotypes maligning natives in colonial texts—Bhabha contends are ambivalent reiterations of colonial power: “For the stereotype is at once a substitute and a shadow. By acceding to the wildest fantasies (in the popular sense) of the colonizer, the stereotyped Other reveals something of the ‘fantasy’ (as desire, defence) of that position of mastery.” This power of the stereotype that derives from its capacity to yoke real and representational forms of cultural discourse comes from its ability to function as fetish. Bhabha makes the tantalizing suggestion that, as a “mode of representation” that is both “anxious as it is assertive,” the stereotype functions as “phobia and fetish.” The fetishistic aspect of the stereotype, this book argues, is key to thinking about its hold on the global imaginary. The fetish object, the stereotype of another culture as it appears in the global novel or film, is inflected with both material and psychic investments. The stereotype is the global commodity par excellence whose appearance obscures even as it reveals social differences that structure the world. Commodity fetishism, as Karl Marx famously noted, works because it mystifies social relations even as it makes them possible. The social division of labor manifests itself in and through the materiality of the object that is produced. Stereotypes of South Asia that circulate globally articulate the manifest material differences between the global north and south. These metaphorical differences resolutely demarcate the global socius in terms of consuming and producing cultures, ownership and labor, autonomy and dependence. Simultaneously, the “stereotype as fetish” also reveals itself as a psychic prosthesis. According to psychoanalytic paradigms, the fetish object

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takes the place of our most tangled desires, displacing onto itself the causes and origins of our overt fixations. The fetish in this additional sense appears as metonym, as a partial sign of libidinal investments that consolidate subjective drives toward mastery and threats to it. Emily Apter has correctly identified the perverse pathographies of what she calls “critical fetishism” based on the psychic double work of the fetish that both simulates the fetishist’s desire by way of an object and exposes its “imposter value.” That is, the fetishist knows that the fetish is a false representation of his or her desire—it is in most cases an ordinary object—but yet its value exceeds this knowledge. The fetish object incites deep affective responses even despite the understanding that it is an empty cipher. The stereotype as fetish shares in this intimate feature of the fetish to simultaneously avow and disavow, as misplaced, the subjective desires it may invoke. In short, the fetishistic aspect of stereotypes is what endows them with the capacity to designate even when exposed as a type, the material, aesthetic, and psychic terrain of alterity. THE STEREOTYPE ’S PERCEPTUAL TERRAIN AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

The closing section of this chapter gives a blueprint of the stereotypes that this book examines as defining the South Asian context. While the chapters mainly revolve around stereotypes that appear in Anglophone literary texts that have a decidedly global audience, some of them probe the appearance of stereotypes in film and other media. On occasion I trace the occurrence of particular narrative stereotypes in relation to dominant images from popular films and media about South Asia that inform and interrogate or in some way supplement the substance of the literary texts. The idea is not to formulate a bifurcated analysis of stereotypes in film and literary texts, but to suggest a symbiotic one. Homi Bhabha notes that stereotypes are formed through “the scopic drive.” In her analysis of ethnic stereotyping, Rey Chow elaborates on the visual force of stereotypes, writing, “the act of stereotyping is always implicated in visuality by virtue of the fact that the other is imagined and transformed into a sur(face), a sheer exterior deprived/independent of historical depth.” Such a focus on the visual significance of stereotypes has in fact been the concern of the majority of scholarly work on cultural stereotypes

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such as that by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Nancy Armstrong, Jorg Schweinitz, and W. J. T. Mitchell. Nancy Armstrong makes the compelling argument that the primacy of stereotypic images that led to the rise of photo-realism in nineteenth-century Britain dictated the conditions for literary realism in Victorian fiction. “Visual culture,” Armstrong writes, “supplied the social classifications that novelists had to confirm, adjust, criticize, or update if they wished to hold the readership’s attention.” For Armstrong, stereotypical images supply “a differential system” for classifying “both things and people” that form the “psychological equipment” readers then use to interpret fiction. Invoking the idea of the stereotype as intrinsic to “modern identity” so that it is “virtually impossible” to eliminate, Armstrong goes on to insist that “cultural stereotypes are real, not because they refer to real bodies, but because they allow us to identify and classify bodies, including our own, as imageobjects, with a place and a name within a still expanding visual order.” These and other studies of the stereotype’s visual power to enthrall and dictate cultural attitudes toward social differences on the basis of types have been enormously influential in getting us to understand the interconnectedness between various modes of representation: textual, filmic, photographic, and, lately, digital. However, the idea that stereotypes shape our ideas of self and other in terms of image-objects that infiltrate our imaginative texts has led to the assumption that, in modernity, image produces text. That is, we live in a primarily visual world of stereotypes. In analyzing the place and reach of stereotypes in global fiction, however, I want to suggest the need for thinking about stereotypes in more pliant ways as a symbiosis of textual and visual codes. In other words, the ethical quandaries that fictional stereotypes invoke participate in multiple perceptual fields—both endlessly metaphorical as well as entirely made up of surface-level symbolics—to express the worldliness of what is known as world literature. Hence, beyond the concern with surface images that stereotypes portray, In Stereotype is also an attempt to move through the overlays between various globalizing forms of representations as they convey stereotypes whose objective is also to transform us in some way. Rey Chow well realizes the potential risks and promises of stereotypical representations to initiate change. “With stereotypes,” Chow argues, “this dangerous residing is not, as is usually assumed, their conventionality

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and formulaicness but rather their capacity for creativity and originality. To put it more bluntly still, the potential and hence danger, of stereotypes is that they are able to conflate these two realms of representational truisms—the conventional and the formulaic, on the one hand, and the creative and the original/originating, on the other.” Juxtaposing visual scenes to scripted ones, as I do here, maintains the porousness of stereotypes as they move fluidly between genres, forms, and mediums toward dangerously narrow repetitions as well as creative new alignments. In her work on cross-cultural stereotypes and the formation of ethnic consciousness, Chow aptly uses the term “coercive mimeticism” to capture the strange suppleness of how stereotypes shape dominant and minor perceptions of ethnicity in postcolonial times. Chow observes that under colonialism, stereotypic mimesis took the white man or colonizer as the all-powerful “original” to be emulated by the colonized, who were always assumed to be the “improper copy.” However, in the present moment Chow notes that stereotypic imitation has become even more intriguing because “the original that is supposed to be replicated is no longer the white man or his culture but rather an image, a stereotyped view of the ethnic” to which all ethnics are supposed to conform. The theory of stereotypic mimesis that Chow offers emphasizes the stereotype’s altered significance for racial and cultural identifications in the global era. Stereotypes, Chow has us realize, are not agents of simple coercion that enforce conformity to dominant cultural precepts from the outside. Instead, extending Bhabha’s earlier suggestion, Chow writes that their coercive effect arises from the psychic ambivalence contained in the stereotype’s ability to compel various forms of mimesis, from ironic mimicry to straightforward imitation. Stereotypes become surreptitiously coercive as they become indistinguishable from what is internally, and affectively, felt to be the naturalized aspects of one’s ethnicity or race. The ethnic, Chow suggests, performs a kind of “Asianness” or “Africanness” that narcissistically affirms authentic identity claims at the same time as they come to reflect prevalent social expectations about “what is recognizably ethnic.” “Indeed,” Chow writes, “ethnics’ voluntary and involuntary manners of mimicking the ethnicity that is pre-scripted, pre-read, and pre-viewed in their utterances, attitudes, gestures, writings, behaviors, and psychologies must now be seen as a part and parcel of the fraught dynamic of coercive

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mimeticism.” Coercive mimeticism usefully describes a complex psychosocial dynamics of how stereotypes work often within a web of seemingly disparate cultural orientations. Ethnic identity, Chow usefully reminds us, is mainly a product of stereotyping that serves minority aspirations even as it mainly forwards mainstream biases. While Chow’s attention on the stereotype’s complex field of play is focused on the idea of ethnicity that emerges (particularly of Asians) in the United States, it remains important to any project such as this one that sees stereotypes in the very different context of global fiction as equally mired in ethical dilemmas that are simultaneously existential, ideological, and representational. Regarding the mimetic force of stereotypes, a little more could be said. All who have thought about the stereotype—from social psychologists to narrative theorists to postcolonial scholars—acknowledge that to write about stereotypes necessitates a slip into a referential representational vortex. To invoke a stereotype is to activate the weight of its biases, to enter into its hermeneutic circle. “The tendency of stereotypes to force—even especially—their most severe critics to inhabit or become what they are criticizing,” Chow cautions, “points to a fundamental discrepancy in representations between intention and manner, signified and signifier.” Stereotypes proliferate in and through repetition. Any attempt to analyze them must thus participate in their renewal. In Stereotype presumes its complicity in repeating stereotypes about South Asia even as it attempts to gauge their impact on our cultural sensibilities. However, if “the stereotype of the stereotype” is that “the stereotype is always bad, simplistic, idiotic,” In Stereotype attempts to reform this idea. This book is ultimately an attempt to conceive the stereotype anew as a site of an ethical demand that calls forth our complicity in stereotypes with which we entangle, and in the ways in which these stereotypes signify the histories we witness through them. THE WORLD IN ENGLISH, THE GLOBALIZATION OF SOUTH ASIA

The aesthetic turn in thinking about stereotypes makes one thing clear: that whether we dread them for their stultifying effect on language or perceive them as potent meaning forming agents, stereotypes are integral to language use. Stereotypes are uniquely defined by their capacity

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to reproduce meaning, to both “duplicate” and “imitate” representational forms interminably. In this book I conjoin the study of stereotypes about South Asia with their particular representational force within Anglophone literature. Clearly, the explicit argument here is that insofar as stereotypes are closely connected to language, the cultural politics of English intimately affect stereotypes about South Asia that gain global resonance. As Rebecca Walkowitz observes, “Anglophone novels travel especially well because English has become the most-read, mosttranslated language in the world.” This is certainly the case for South Asia, where the history of British colonialism ensures the dominance of the Anglophone novel. Of course, if this were a book about the French Caribbean, or Maghreb Africa, or parts of the Middle East, the focus would be on the transnational relationships between Creole, French, Arabic, Berber, and so on. But in South Asia, English—even modified as it is into Indianized dialects—remains the dominant literary language (even as it is challenged and contested by a plethora of regional vernaculars) that continues to articulate South Asia’s emergence as a postcolony on a world stage. Whether English or any other dominant colonial language can ever adequately represent the concerns of the ex-colonized has been a fraught question that has been hotly debated by postcolonial writers and thinkers from Frantz Fanon to Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie, and others. Some have called for the outright boycott of colonial-derived languages in the postcolony while others have championed their hybrid appropriations by other linguistic traditions. In addition to these issues, there is an isomorphism between stereotypes about South Asia and the emergence of an Anglophone canon of literature from the subcontinent that is worth marking. If we are to think seriously of the kinds of stereotypes about poverty, overpopulation, squalor, terror, and the like that this book intimates are part and parcel of South Asia’s image in the world, it is imperative that we understand this as an aspect of the transnationalization of English. The fact that English literature today is undoubtedly transnational speaks to its singular ability to crisscross all manner of boundaries, and to advertize as well as disturb stereotypes about Britain’s former colonies for the rest of the world. To understand the transnational traffic of stereotypes about South Asia, this book maintains, is thus to acknowledge the unparalleled global purchase of the English language in which

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many of these stereotypes are communicated. As Paul Jay notes in his recent study of globalization, There is an obvious synchronicity between the transnational production of English and the transnationalizing of its study. . . . The globalization of English is not a theoretical formulation. . . . It is a simple fact of contemporary history. English literature in the age of globalization is increasingly transnational. . . . For this reason, English literature is becoming increasingly more difficult to understand without recognizing its relationship to a complicated web of transnational histories linked to the historical processes of globalization.

A similar argument could be made about the circulation of stereotypes. To understand the transnational influence of stereotypes, one must consider the synchronicity between particular stereotypes, the global language that mediates them, and the uneven power plays within a globalizing world order. Indeed, the capacity of Anglophone representations to harness the power to create and convey stereotypes about South Asia comes in part from the tensions between global and national politics that simmered in the decolonial moment. India’s effort at self-fashioning, its concern for its image in the world, coincided in this historical moment with the articulation of a radically nonviolent defiance of colonial occupation. The collective vulnerability of nonviolent resisters facing down the force of colonial occupation became a foil for the deprivations of civic life under colonial rule. A metonym for the politics of need and lack felt under colonialism, together with the redress sought from it, the ethos of passive resistance sought to affect both national and global sentiments against the British. Early Anglophone novels, for instance, which portray the ravages of hunger as a mode of countercolonial recalcitrance, participate in making the case for India’s autonomy to an international audience. At the same time, the question of whether or not English could reflect India’s distinctive national character and address the needs of its people past colonialism remained a worry to the nationalist movement. The ferment against colonialism evidenced in the noncooperation struggle was driven by an awareness of English’s purchase as a transnational language that could be used to secure and manage India’s image in the globe. The need

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to maintain national definition had to be carefully balanced, as Gandhi seemed well aware, by the effective management of the nation’s stereotypes enabled when its interests were broadcast through the use of an international language. In a speech delivered as the presidential address to the Second Gujarat Educational Conference on October 20, 1917, shortly after his return from his sojourn in Transvaal, South Africa, Gandhi spurned the notion that English could effectively represent India’s national language and advocated, instead, for instituting Hindi. Gandhi made his points thus: The condition of our educated classes gives one the impression that all our activities would come to a standstill if we stop the use of English. And yet deeper thought will show that English cannot be the national language of India. . . . It will certainly be required for imperial affairs. That, therefore, it will be an imperial language, the language of diplomacy, is a different question. On that purpose its knowledge is a necessity. We are not jealous of English. All that is contended for is, that it not be allowed to go beyond its proper sphere. And as it will be the imperial language . . . we shall feel assured that [Indians who know English] will advertise the greatness of India in other parts of the world. But English cannot become the national language of India. . . . In my opinion, it is unmanly even to think that English can become our national language.

On closer inspection, however, Gandhi’s seemingly uncompromising polemic against English actually elaborates the “proper sphere” within which the influence of English in postcolonial India may be allowed to permeate. By acknowledging that the English language “will certainly be required for imperial affairs,” Gandhi’s response hinges on an uncertain logic that ascertains that English remains instrumental in India’s future while also insisting that it can have no enduring cultural relevance within India. What is striking in Gandhi’s passionate dismissal of English is that the very functional pragmatism with which he sees English as a “necessity” for India’s continuance as a global player is also simultaneously undone by refusing its affective binds within the not-yet-nascent nation. “We are not jealous of English,” he assuredly declares. The very need for such assertiveness attests to the thick and beleaguered debates

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over language, autonomy, and representation that were so constitutive of the anticolonial politics of the time. Gandhi’s solution to the language question selectively allows English a certain legitimacy, effectively recognizing its powerful global dimension while effacing its more immediate relevance and enmeshments within local, vernacular culture. So, while Anglophone intelligentsia in India are charged with ensuring that “India’s greatness” continues to circulate globally, that in fact Indian English thrives in this measure as a worldly construct, Gandhi seeks to limit its local representational scope. No doubt there is a deep ambivalence that lingers in this partial acceptance of English. English is viewed as the most profound vehicle of infiltration that can represent free India’s differences in the world. English, as Gandhi recognizes, is the language through which global stereotypes about India have to be managed for its self-promotion. At the same time, it is seen as inhering in the texts of colonial oppositionality and, by that logic, must be internally spurned. The mediating boundary between the legitimacy with which English may be permitted to project India on the world stage and its local irrelevance is negotiated on the infirm registers of collective sentiment, intimacy, and gender that in themselves produce new stereotypes about Indian society. To localize English in India, to make English Indian outside of its global dimension, to be intimate with the language here in these parts, would result after all, as Gandhi puts it, in being “unmanned.” More interestingly, however, for this project on stereotypes in South Asian Anglophone literature, the contradictory impulse underpinning Gandhi’s appraisal of English as an “unmanly” language for representing any collective aspect of postcolonial India suggestively harbors both its promise and peril. India, as Gandhi realizes, needs to make itself known on the world stage and, in so doing, to willfully enter into the discursive frays of globalism characteristic of later modernity; yet this entry itself will always be constitutively dependent on the ways in which the asymmetries of colonialism continue to persist, especially in the language that dominates the afterlife of formal colonialism. The insecure place of Indian English, its potential expressivity abroad as well as its domestic queerness in Gandhian terms, conjoins and denatures the differential ways in which colonial and postcolonial reality are collectively experienced. Anglophone fictions of India thus bear the imprint of mediations through which the vacillating stereotypes of colonial modernity are

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collectively experienced as the murky difference between progress and barbarism, spiritual clarity and material desire, purity and pollution, the valor of protest and the pain of penance, and, ultimately as well, forms and allegiances of the self and its obligations to the other. The schism that Gandhi rehearses between the global and local deployment of English within the anticolonial movement recalls the inceptions of a vexed colonial past in which the institutionalization of English in India was envisioned as a project of partial cultural conversion to produce stereotypes about Indians as compliant and servile, a set of stereotypes that were indispensable to the flourishing of the Raj. In Thomas Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education,” delivered in 1835, almost a century prior to Gandhi’s call for a national language other than English, Macaulay had infamously envisioned the creation of a class of “interpreters,” “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” who could most efficiently facilitate British colonial governance of India. Dismissing, as he did, the whole literatures of Arabic and Sanskrit in favor of a single shelf of a good European library, Macaulay’s program for consolidating British rule through the proliferation of English education abroad also allied the language itself with the emergent transnational prospects of empire. It is noteworthy that Macaulay’s proposal for the deliberate deterritorialization of English in order to eventually secure British control over the colony was made while India was still under the mandate of the East India Company. In this sense, Macaulay, through argument as well as the promotion of specific Parliamentary Acts, both anticipated and instigated the planned proximities between English studies and overseas imperial interests. In relegating English use to matters of foreign diplomacy, Gandhi revisits the opening gestures of globalism and governance that constituted the colonialist rhetoric of English in India during the formative years of colonialism. The calls to secure English for India in both cases are arguably about controlling the production and play of cultural stereotypes that emerge through transnational language relations. DURABLE STEREOTYPES: ANTICOLONIAL SOUTH ASIA

Despite Gandhi’s reservations about the usefulness of English within India, Gandhi and Gandhian anticolonialism engender lasting stereotypes about South Asia in the global imaginary. In Stereotype grapples

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with some of the most salient collective stereotypes about postcolonial South Asia such as of India’s overcrowding and slums, of perpetual war in Sri Lanka, and of terror more generally that emerge on a transnational stage in contemporary Anglophone novels. However, the global purchase of many of these stereotypes, the grip they maintain on a global reading public, is due in part to the lingering, residual impressions that remain of India’s collective anticolonial postures. The stereotypes that emerged during the anticolonial moment merge with contemporary ideas about collective life on the subcontinent and are parlayed into new forms of difference in the current corpus of fiction about South Asia. Indeed, the very first Indian Anglophone novels, such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938), focalize hunger, emaciation, and self-starvation as prevalent forms of collective, anticolonial identification on the subcontinent. These first realist Anglophone novels from India refashion some of the most intractable colonial stereotypes about Indian weakness, depravity, and lack of agency. Katherine Mayo’s claims that “inertia, helplessness, lack of initiative and originality, lack of staying power and of sustained loyalties, sterility of enthusiasm, weakness of life-vigor itself—all are traits that characterize the Indian not only of today, but of long-past history” crystallize the climate of stereotypes about Indians against which Anglophone Indian novelists write. As counterpoints, these early works, particularly Kanthapura, cohere around the fictional figure of the “hunger striker” to portray the harrowing vitality of the Gandhian nonviolent struggle. In the process, they produce images of Indian recalcitrance—countervailing stereotypes—as spectacularly embodied performances of abstinence, endurance, and purity against the violent colonial state. These works, however, also critique the choreography of anticolonialist struggle, by sedimenting other stereotypes of hunger as a radical form of deprivation experienced by the masses of poor and outcaste in India. The untouchable Bakha in Anand’s novel, for instance, experiences a level of shame and dehumanizing hunger on the basis of caste that challenges the liberal anticolonialism of Gandhi’s hunger fasts. In this second analytic, the hungry—associated with filth, famine, and poverty—become ciphers for India’s social failure. Thus, the specters of hunger (as political protest or acute deprivation) that linger in these literary portraits are anomalous to one another. They gesture toward an unfinished struggle over South Asia’s postcolonial

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image, one that is often deflected onto other dire stereotypes about the postcolony as crushed by multitudes, slums, and death. The desire to articulate a nationalist identity that represented India and Indianess in sharp contrast to the mixed cultural affiliations of English India coalesced around the ethos of nonviolence and the figure of the hunger striker, arguably the most enduring stereotype of India’s passive resistance to colonialism. Yet even novels that reproduce the mythic performances of anticolonial protest through the postures of abstinence, endurance, effeminacy, and purity adopted through the hunger strike gesture to hunger’s other material terrain. As the prevailing stereotype for anticolonial resistance, hunger is cast both as a form of obstinate refusal of colonial governance and as a sign of widespread lack experienced by the masses. Hunger thus becomes the source of a double and contradictory stereotype, sedimenting a stereotype of willful passive resistance incommensurable with the kinds of radical suffering stereotypically associated with the poor and outcaste. Poverty, filth, and deprivation animate another set of literary stereotypes about South Asia that trouble the horizon of possibility envisioned by the emancipatory politics of the noncooperation movement. Lingering in these texts, even as they portray India’s engagement with a later modernity, are specters of deep social difference that call into question South Asia’s emergence as a postcolony. Profoundly tied to images of dirt and desperate emaciation, stereotypes of hunger-as-need hold in abeyance the promise of freedom secured by stereotypes of hunger-as-defiance. In the first novels in English from India, the immediate social dynamics of the anticolonial moment shapes stereotypes about Indian rectitude and weakness for a global literary audience. During his lifetime and since, Gandhi and the passive resistance movement have been represented in numerous vernacular novels and plays. Additionally, Gandhi’s outright refusal to adopt English to India as one of its tongues has not halted, as it turns out, his movement’s easy and ubiquitous adoption into Indian English novels. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find early Anglophone novels from India preoccupied with depicting the nonviolent movement’s groundswell influence on Indian social life. In the process, Gandhi himself, as well as the kind of collective idea of India that is stereotyped through him, metamorphoses time and again into fiction. The critic Meenakshi Mukherjee has written that

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no discussion of Indo-Anglian fiction, dealing with the independence movement would be complete without an assessment of the function of Mahatma Gandhi in these novels. The most potent force behind the whole movement, the Mahatma is a recurring presence in their novels and he is used in different ways to suit the design of each writer. He has been treated variously as an idea, a myth, a symbol, tangible reality and a benevolent human being. In a few novels he appears in person, in most others is an invisible presence.

Simultaneously “myth,” “symbol,” and “reality,” fictions of collective pacifism are thus instrumental to the formation and circulation of stereotypes about India. Aside from novels by Rao and Anand, R. K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma, Chaman Nahal’s The Crown and the Loincloth, Nayantara Sahgal’s Mistaken Identity, Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India are a few among numerous Anglophone Indian novels that project the nonviolence movement, and Gandhi in particular, as formative for how India’s image is conceived within global Anglophone contexts. Antagonist stereotypes—for example, of hunger as lack and resistance—privileged in these texts, as I show especially in the second chapter on slums, endure in future literary representations of the subcontinent even when specific referents to the decolonial scene fall away. As metaphor, the particular postures of collective nonviolence have come to signify, at times, a facile shorthand for fortitude, passive and peaceful dissention, extraordinary spirit of tolerance, and even, as is the case with Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, a new masculine effeminacy associated with the postcolony. But as stereotypes for contemporary South Asia, these metaphors often breach the boundaries between self and other, purity and abjection, and newly normative gender codes that they invoke. Perhaps because of the ready and contradictory significations that attach to passive nonviolence in the first place, references to Gandhian modes of enacting dissent continue to flourish in postcolonial and diasporic Indian narratives. After all, nonviolence, as Faisal Devji argues, involves an embrace of violence against one’s own humanity. The examples of the ambivalence that prior stereotypes about South Asian passivity attain in contemporary fiction, in fact, are many. They gesture to new modes of subaltern vulnerability—communal and gender

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violence, unfettered development, forced migration and labor—aligned with the global south. In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s Saleem practices an intensive form of self-deprivation and meditation when serving as a tracker in the Pakistani army during the Indo-Pak war of the 1970s. Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel parodies the Gandhian era as part of the cosmic scope of the epic Mahabharata. There is also Palimpana, the reclusive epigraphist in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, who renounces the world in order to represent a history that Sri Lanka’s civil war cannot. And Anwar, the immigrant and Muslim patriarch in Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia, who goes on an increasingly abject hunger strike to coerce his British-born daughter, Jamila, into an arranged marriage. And more recently Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss describes the cosmopolitan snobbery, cultural muddles, and physical violations at the Gandhi café in New York that makes Biju’s life there as a cook intolerable. Harish Harry, the owner of the café, is of course both a confessed devout and a market-savvy entrepreneur seeking instant gratification in the new global economy. All of these disparate invocations of equivalence between South Asia and anticolonial passivity reflect its stability as a stereotype while also interrogating its value as a normative cultural construct in contexts ranging from war to neoliberalism to immigrant identifications in a fully transnationalized postcolony. The stereotypes of Indian defiance and destitution that remain over from the decolonial period never quite resolve into a clear “reality” about India. They invoke instead contradictory ways of imagining South Asia that continue to resonate and shape the ways in which literary representations of this region are framed globally. This is a point that I illustrate in the rest of the book. The very uncertainties that attach to stereotypes about self-representation—articulated through Nehruvian liberalism or Gandhian nonviolence—when fashioned biopolitically open a critical space for thinking about future orientations of the postcolony. The scope and effect of the most prominent stereotypes about India that arise in the anticolonial moment and their infiltration into our present metaphors for contending with South Asia, as Rushdie suggests, may yet be waiting to be unraveled: “Gandhi,” Rushdie writes, “who gave up cosmopolitanism to gain a country, has become, in his strange afterlife, a citizen of the world: his spirit may yet prove resilient, smart, tough, sneaky and, yes, ethical enough to avoid assimilation by global McCulture (and

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Mac culture too). Against this new empire, Gandhian intelligence is a better weapon than Gandhian piety. And passive resistance? We’ll see.” Rushdie’s parsing of the indeterminate ethos of anticolonialism that Gandhi represents—as spirit or power, worldly or native, a new form of intelligence against the global flattening of culture, or a form of enervated piety—signals the enduring ways in which the stereotypes associated with him and his time continue to impact our idea of how India is imagined in terms of the “strange afterlife” of its anticolonial history with respect to current geopolitics. Among other things, this is a project about tracing some of the promises and perils of this strange afterlife. REDUX, SOUTH ASIA IN STEREOTYPES: A BLUEPRINT

The following chapter, “To Understand Me, You’ll Have to Swallow a World,” considers stereotypes about crowds and overpopulation mainly in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The novel is preoccupied with anxieties about the future of the subcontinent’s newly formed postcolonies. The anxiety manifests in the text’s attempt to represent the political threshold of decolonization as a collective, polyphonic experience. To what extent do the stereotypes that emerge as a result diverge from Orwellian notions of abject “native crowds” and “hordes”? And of ideas about famished, wonting masses that appear in earlier texts? Drawing on Hardt and Negri’s thesis that the “productive flesh of the multitude” has the “unruly” capacity to challenge the neoliberal world order, the chapter examines the extent to which Rushdie’s magical realism reinvents colonial stereotypes of “dirty” and “disorderly” mobs to reflect a new immanent potential for the children of Midnight. Largely, the multitude exists in Rushdie’s fiction to reify stereotypical images of the subcontinent as teeming, chaotic, heteronormative, excessively consumptive, and fecund—a vision of a people aligned with the goals of a liberal state. Against the force of the stereotype there are within Rushdie’s text hints of fuzzy collectives—of queers, squatters, and women—that are formed in the fringes or “beside” (in the sense meant by Eve Sedgwick) this novel’s predominant metaphor for Indian freedom—its 600 million inhabitants. Population stereotypes recast as “mobile, resilient” counterpublics preserve a provocative utopian horizon for South Asia’s future worldly orientation.

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The third chapter, “Slum Dog or White Tiger?” examines stereotypes about squatter colonies and slums that have recently attracted a global audience. In particular I discuss the appearance of slums in Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize–winning novel The White Tiger alongside the more commercially successful film Slumdog Millionaire. This chapter highlights the convergence of stereotypes about hunger, poverty, and overcrowding around ideas of “slumming” as criminality. Beyond this, I consider how what Mike Davis has identified as “myths” about “the third economy” or “informal economy” of slums suggests a reinvention of the slum’s age-old associations with criminality. The burgeoning shantytowns in the megalopolises of South Asia uniquely anchor stereotypes about their inhabitants in the very real, structured differences accelerated by a globalizing economy. Yet imaginative fictions about slums pose the material deprivation inherent in slum dwelling as a catalyst for inventive ways of living on the thresholds of late modernity. This chapter ultimately addresses this contradiction between the dysphoric life of slums and notions of cunning life—enactments of piracy, stealth work, and acquisitiveness—that circulate when South Asia is conflated with its uneven urban landscape. The slum arguably becomes a stereotypical placeholder for both the most abject subalternity and the most “magical” space of community under globalization. Following the biocultural implications of stereotypes about slums, the fourth chapter is about fictional preoccupations with violence and death as endemic to the subcontinent. “The Dead that Haunt Anil’s Ghost” takes Ondaatje’s haunting novel about the Sri Lankan civil war as staging ground for probing some of the paradoxes that arise in postcolonial fictions that deal with stereotypes about death that are moored to a particular place and real events. What is conveyed by novels of war and genocide that cast the whole of a decolonial territory as, to use Achille Mbembe’s characterization, a “deathworld”? If violent death is taken as a staple of the postcolony, how do global novels such as Anil’s Ghost implicate us as readers within this scene to realign our own fidelities? This chapter forwards the view that the prism of death in Anil’s Ghost makes a critical demand on those who consume this text that involves relinquishing our settled notions of how we as humans understand our finitude, understand our entanglements with the deaths of others, and ascribe meaning to death itself. The idea that this work advances, that

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life elsewhere is inherently insecure, redirects salient notions about the value of human life appraised through a dominant human rights framework. Here I draw on the ideas of Mbembe, Jacques Derrida, and affective psychoanalysis to ground my analysis of the ethical demands made on us as readers by the deaths of others as part of what may be termed “subaltern melancholia.” “From Bangladesh to Brick Lane” turns the focus of the book in this next chapter to stereotypes about South Asia that literally cross borders in an instance of diasporic fiction. This chapter looks at what happens when the stereotype about a people follows them as they move from the colony to the metropole. I suggest that the stereotype undergoes, and engenders, a crisis of authenticity as the text interrogates the essentialism of both British and Bangladeshi identities. The controversy around the publication of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane as well as the novel itself refract what Sara Suleri has called the “dislocated idiom of migrancy” to bring the crises of stereotypes of destitution, displacement, tenement housing, and crowds to bear on the psychic idea the West has of itself. Under globalization, these stereotypes appear to saturate the metropolitan West while also urging a new reckoning with their ethical dimensions. The novel’s engagement with the domestication of transnational labor thus compels us to think about the extent to which the uneven differences of globalization depend on the traffic of stereotypes. The feminization of the garment industry, the dereliction of estate housing for immigrants, and the specter of unassimilable migrants reinvent stereotypes attached to Bangladesh and its migrants such that Britishness itself appears to be in crisis. In Stereotype concludes by reasserting its main argument that the global literary imaginary is replete with stereotypes about other cultures that serve an urgent critical function in realigning our psychic, social, and political allegiances. In the last chapter, “Good and Bad Transnationalisms?,” I turn to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist to think about how this novel draws us into a psychic identification with stereotypes about South Asia’s place in the world, only to disrupt them time and again. As a post-9/11 novel, this and other novels force us to contemplate our involvement in how collectives elsewhere are mirrored in our ideas about the globe. The overt tension that this novel plays on is one between terror and work, which contrasts the rage and revenge

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associated with terrorism with the hard work and conformity of good corporate workers. In addition to Hamid’s novel, I also briefly explore the making of the call-center genre in Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at the Call Center, and the success of the Outsourced film and television series. Aligned with both, South Asia emerges as the zero-sum crucible for what the pursuit of freedom means in our age. Stereotypes of the terrorist in these instances enthrall as much as those of the corporate night-shifter because both reform assumptions about how coercion and free will are globally perceived. The book closes with a brief reflection on the ethics of reading stereotypes as part of what is now fashionably called “global fiction.”

2 TO UNDERSTAND ME, YOU’LL HAVE TO SWALLOW A WORLD MARGINS , MULTITUDES , AND THE NATION IN SALMAN RUSHDIE ’ S MIDNIGHT ’ S CHILDREN

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, a labyrinthine portrayal of India’s arrival at the point of independence, conjoins the postcolony’s autonomy to the emergence of multitudes. The novel advances a stereotype about the subcontinent as teeming with immanently fecund and newly autonomous multitudes vying for recognition and the chance to direct its political future. This stereotype of South Asia that aligns freedom with the formation of newly energized collectives seems to posit the need to think about the postcolony beyond the singular, individualistic freedoms valued by liberal democracy. In this sense, the novel provokes a consideration of how postcolonial freedom may be envisioned as a prospect for rethinking the “imagined community” as a collective national endeavor. Population stereotypes in Midnight’s Children are, however, heterogeneous. Multitudes in the novel are chaotic, consuming, and hyperregenerative in ways that are perfectly articulated to India’s insertion into emergent global economies. At the same time, Midnight’s Children also gives us glimpses of minor collectives—namely queers, working women, and ghetto dwellers—within the nation. These fringes of the multitudes of midnight complicate how we view the novel’s primary stereotype of the desirous, surging, and unbound multitudes unleashed in the moment of decolonization. Timothy Brennan contends that, “in the case of Salman Rushdie . . . the examples of India and Pakistan are, above all, an opportunity to

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explore post-colonial responsibility.” The stereotype of the multitude in Rushdie’s novel is key to ideas about collective agency, identity, and freedom that influence how postcolonies are seen in the global imaginary as bearing or shedding their responsibilities. Saleem Sinai’s failed attempt to find and adhere to a “third principle” that transcends the “endless duality of the masses-and-classes, capital-and-labour, them-and-us” signals the triumph of modernity’s developmental narrative. Saleem’s failure may be read as Rushdie’s critique of India’s developmental narrative, one that remains entrenched in furthering a national identity ensnared by dualistic adversities. At the same time, Saleem’s inability to single-handedly manage the postcolony’s multitudinous present suggests that the lens of individual achievement is inadequate for thinking about the future of the nation. Even beyond this, the sheer force of the multitude—the most pervasive stereotype for South Asia within this novel—that upends Saleem’s utopian vision requires that we ask about the valence of this stereotype for the postcolony. Does the recalcitrance of the multitudes that ends Saleem’s dream of reconciling divisive fractures within the nation suggest an alternate way of imagining India’s future? I offer the following thesis: as a stereotype of the postcolony’s sheer populousness, the multitude coalesces the idea of the global south as intrinsically suited to processes of liberalization. Despite Rushdie’s critique of some forms of developmentalism, the allegory of the postcolony’s failure in Midnight’s Children is reconciled to a stereotype about the multitude that is infinite in its capacity to reproduce itself. This stereotype makes hyperreproducibility, which is dependent on core values invested in simply reproducing on some level the political economy of the liberal state itself, the dominant metaphor of civic life in the global south. The stereotype of the multitude is that it relentlessly reproduces the social outlines of the postcolony to conform to colonialist forms of civil society. Indeed, in Rushdie’s fiction this idea of the multitude is one that seems to overtake all attempts to organize and imagine social arrangements otherwise, whether as a third “form,” as in Saleem’s case, or as the presence and activism of minor collectives that maintain tenuous presences within the nation. Still, because the stereotype also relies on the idea that multitudes are essentially unmanageable, Midnight’s Children hints at utopian communities within the nation—for example of Marxists, sexual minorities, squatters, working

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women—who remain resolutely nonconformist to the novel’s dominant stereotype for imagining India. This gives rise to countervailing stereotypes that would seem to be at odds with one another but because of magical realism are actually imbricated within one another and enable one another. MAGICAL MULTITUDES, REAL MULTITUDES: THE SALIENCE OF GENRE

It is nearly impossible to say anything new about Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Published to great critical acclaim, Midnight’s Children (1981), along with Shame (1983), are two of Rushdie’s early novels that deal explicitly with the political upheavals and transformations brought about by the decolonization of the Indian subcontinent. Midnight’s Children, which went on to win the Booker Prize at the time of its publication, instantly placed not only Rushide but also a new kind of fiction on the map. It could be argued that postcolonial literature itself, insofar as it inaugurated a global literary movement, drew its first breath from this novel. Indeed, so much has been written about this novel—as an allegory for postcolonial India, of cultural and linguistic hybridity, as a farcical and traumatic bildungsroman, and as a genre-bending exercise that altered the course of the English novel itself—that it is difficult to clear space for more. Edward Said makes the point that Midnight’s Children epitomizes the idea of postcolonial “resistance” as “a reaction to imperialism” that is perforce cultural and imaginative. “Midnight’s Children,” Said writes, “is a brilliant work based on the liberating imagination of independence itself, with all its anomalies and contradictions working themselves out.” Such critical appraisals confirm Rushdie’s novel as the first among many to conjoin cultural innovation with the energetic political and social upheavals wrought by decolonization. The stereotypes about India and its multitudes that Midnight’s Children proliferates on a global stage emerge from the allegory of postcolonial independence that Said observes is at the heart of the novel. The novel itself claims to be the vertiginous memoir of one Saleem Sinai, born mysteriously at the exact moment—midnight of August 15, 1947—of India’s independence from Britain. At the age of thirty-one, Saleem, convinced that he is to be annihilated shortly because of the cracks

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appearing on his body after Partition, begins the epic task of telling his life story to Padma, his illiterate and skeptical companion. Over the course of thirty chapters, one for each year of his life, he recounts a turgid family history beginning in 1915 in Kashmir, moving through his birth, the partition of the subcontinent, the Bangladesh war of liberation, and the controversial Emergency of 1975 that was declared by Indira Gandhi due to alleged political instability. Along the way, we learn that Saleem is gifted with telepathic powers; that his parentage is a confusing jumble of adoption and surrogate claims; that he has incestuous feelings for his sister; that he was coerced to fight in the war Pakistan waged on what was then not yet Bangladesh; that he has exceptional olfactory talents; he almost attained Buddhic salvation; and that he has an evil twin, Shiva. The novel also details Saleem’s encounter with myriad characters, all of whom seem strangely endowed with some fantastic capacity to affect his life. Saleem, moreover, is a highly self-conscious narrator, continually telling and revising his story. His knowledge and recall of the past are both total and fragmentary because he is so continually plagued by uncertainty and given to digression. In essence, his vision of India is both encyclopedic and fallible because, as Rushdie notes, Saleem’s narration is “suspect” and “his vision is fragmentary.” Too many others continually “leak” into and attempt to take over his story. Saleem’s chief desire is to lead all the other children of midnight, with whom he teleconferences nightly, to shape a better future for the postcolony, but his attempt to transindividuate the experience of the multitudes around him is continually thwarted. As is apparent, the signal feature of Midnight’s Children is its magical realism. The texture of the novel that so persistently melds the real with the fantastic, the historical with the imaginative, and the permanent with the aleatory to convey the syncretic dimension of life on the subcontinent eludes easy resolutions. Rather than “contradictions” that “work themselves out,” the stereotypes of the multitude within Rushdie’s prose remain deliberately open-ended. They are attached, as I show in the next sections, equally to singular ideations about the emergence of the postcolonial nation as to concerns over how the universal multiplicity of independence should be reflected to a global Anglophone audience. Said, well aware of this aspect of Rushdie’s novel, writes that “the conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix

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with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories is of particular interest in Rushdie’s work.” That the stereotypes about India that Midnight’s Children advances are ultimately plural, gesturing to stable ideologies that define the postcolonial nation’s collective identity and at the same time to shadowy collectives that remain obfuscated from its mainframes, is an effect of magical realism’s restlessness. Thus, in Rushdie’s story of national liberation, while the multitudes of midnight largely signify the emergence of a liberal postcolonial public, their excessive and indeed hyperbolic significations also reproduce the formations and elisions of countercultures in the postcolony. “How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?” Rushdie asks in The Satanic Verses, his later novel about the postcolony’s quintessential global crossings. In an essay, he supplies the following answer: “Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.” The multitude, as Rushdie imagines it, emerges as a profoundly weighty stereotype about postcolonial India because it reflects both the condition for the “birth” of the nation and the effort to bridge its most disparate, untranslatable, and unruly factions. Having disclosed himself impotent, Saleem, “the prophet” of the new nation, describes his experience of its multitudinousness as others born at the hour of India’s independence communicate to and through him: My voices, far from being sacred, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust. . . . Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for spaces within my head . . . there was a language problem. The voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Lucknow Urdu to the Southern slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said . . . [before] language faded away and was replaced by universally intelligible thought forms which far transcended words.

In this moment, Saleem essentially gives birth to the multitudes of midnight. The surreality of the story allows that Saleem is the multitudes’ singular presence in the text—multitudes are described as “his” voices—

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and yet he is the antithesis of the multitudes. Multitudes, emblematic of India’s “hotchpotch,” are “teeming millions of masses and classes” who “jostle” for recognition. Saleem’s singularity, his monovocality, is a solitary counter to their immanence. The importance of his individuality is contested by “the polyglot frenzy” in his head that devolves into a multiplicity of existential cries, “transmitting simply, ‘I.’ From far to the North, ‘I.’ And the South East West: ‘I.’ ‘I.’ ‘And I.’” Yet the best account the novel gives of the multitudes’ infinitely surging differences is to convey Saleem’s increasingly feeble attempts to assimilate them to his voice. This appropriation of difference into singularity rides on the effectiveness of a “universally intelligible” form—here, magical realism—that can manage or evacuate the dispersions of the multitude. The multitude reconciled to the form of magical realism is one way in which the novel maps the stereotype as a universal yet always splintering sign for India. It is worth lingering for a moment on certain aspects of magical realism that seem compatible with the contours of stereotypic reproducibility that I have explored in the introduction. Magical realism, especially of the kind Rushdie pursues, hinges on the idea that history or reality is already contaminated by its obverse, absurdity and imaginative fiction. Formally, Rushdie’s magically real fiction proceeds, much like stereotypes do, by furiously fusing real historical events to fantastic exaggerations. David Mikics observes that “magical realism may transfigure a historical account via phantasmagorial narrative excess,” the effect of which, he argues, “is to liberate history’s destructive aspect into an imaginative sense of the future.” By this definition, magical realism is at its core a utopian struggle over the politics of representation. It seeks, as do stereotypes, to authorize certain forms of mimetic recognition as viable for the future while discounting others. The premise of Rushdie’s magical realism is that history, reality, fiction, and fantasy are virtually indistinguishable from one another. It is no surprise that Rushdie declares with some satisfaction that in India no one conceives of Midnight’s Children “as a fantasy novel; they talk about it as a novel of history and politics.” Stereotypes also straddle a line between the real and fictive that is porous. The stereotype of the multitude, in other words, is energized by the historical narratives with which the magical realist mode of Rushdie’s fiction wrestles. Saleem, we must remember, is born “mysteriously handcuffed to history,” and the multitudes he is “indissolubly chained” to and

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desires to reconcile with himself are given shape by the novel’s portraits of Indian history. Fredric Jameson makes the point that “the possibility of magical realism as a formal mode is constitutively dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction is structurally present.” In what follows, I trace the way in which the stereotype of the multitude in Midnight’s Children is caught in the frames of such “disjunctive” histories of an Indian national identity in the making. Jameson makes the further argument that magical realism grapples with historical narratives that accentuate the idea of “history with holes, perforated history, which includes history not immediately visible to us.” As I show, the multitude’s stereotypical force derives in large part from its uncertain alignments with major and minor histories. In the process, the stereotype reveals how collective identifications are formed in postcolonial India and the extent to which certain collectivities remain inchoate, only faintly perceptible given the occlusions of a strictly historical lens. Something needs to be said about why the multitude comes to have such enduring salience as a stereotype for South Asia in the global imaginary. I have been making the argument that this is partly because it occupies a place between magicality and reality that bridges the gap between history and fiction. Jameson posits that in occupying this uncertain gap between historical raw material and its fictional reinvention, magical realism takes on “an anthropological perspective.” The idea that India is “multitudinous” takes flight because of the anthropological allure that underpins magical realism. Wendy Faris makes the case that the magical real “provides a fictional ground in which to imagine alternative visions of agency and history.” Certainly, the fluctuating registers that signify the multitude—as singular, plural, sanguine, shriveled, dominant, and repressed—can do so because of the peculiar charge of a fictive mode that conveys historical progress even as it dwells on its discontinuities. Stephen Slemon has noted that magical realism is particularly suited to represent the postcolonial condition because of its capacity to engage a “battle” between “oppositional systems” that remain “suspended.” In a way, this kind of suspension is made possible by this genre’s unique ability to profer countervailing stereotypes around singular concepts. Because the multitudes Rushdie writes of appear as organized, legible collectives that represent Indian anticolonial postures, and as illegible others excised from the dominant

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story of India’s modernization, it resonates with the “ambivalence” that stereotypes typically articulate. The genre of magical realism is what enlivens the force of the stereotype as an interpretive occasion for a global audience to perceive the postcolony in anthropological swaths and, indeed, to read it. The hyperbole of magical realism, its infinite capacity to reproduce the seemingly familiar as exaggerated forms of difference, is structurally similar to the stereotype that is just as fungible. The genre plays on the ambivalent and duplicitous character of stereotypes by invoking stereotypes seemingly at odds with one another but which nonetheless work in tandem with one another. Multitudes come to designate forms of cultural alterity that are recognizably familiar even in their otherness: India as crowded, nonviolent, aspirationally free, socially and sexually repressed, etc. If, as Homi Bhabha asserts, magical realism is the “literary language of the emergent postcolonial world,” the efficacy of this language is its ability to offer conflictual stereotypes about the postcolony to the world. STEREOTYPING THE SINGULAR UNIVERSAL

The contradictory resonances that the multitude as a global stereotype for South Asia acquires within Midnight’s Children may be explained by the recent critical currency of the term “multitude.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conceive of the multitude as a form of collectivity capable of contesting the autonomy and authority that liberal democracies invest in individual self-fashioning. Multitudes, they argue, pose a challenge to the way that individuality and modernity manifestly reflect one another. Rather than the emphasis on the emergence of the singular self, multitudes are theorized as representing the immanent capacity of collectives to shape the world differently. Multitudes are, according to Hardt and Negri, a form of global sovereignty that unmakes the isomorphism of state, nation, and individual autonomy that perpetuates late capitalism. Yet it is important to note that for Hardt and Negri, as for Baruch Spinoza, multitudes are formed on the basis of singularities. Described alternatively as “plural singularities” or “common singularities,” the internal law of multitudes— their autonomous, self-perpetuating agency if you will—is contingent on their contrary ideation of collectives as both singular and universal. Multitudes, these philosophers assert, are “singularities that act in common.”

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The multitude in Midnight’s Children is a stereotype that precisely tracks this tension between the singular and the plural in representing the uncertain prospect of India’s decolonial moment. Rushdie portrays this moment as a threshold when fierce struggles are waged to draw the contours of a collective yet distinctive identity for the nation. It is also a moment ripe for the postcolony to make a collective claim upon the global imaginary. The emergence of postcolonial multitudes could signal the arrival of a “new social body” in which we may all be part of a collective revolutionary landscape in the sense imagined by Hardt and Negri. Postcolonial multitudes represent a universal extensive form of resistance that could potentially work against Empire itself. Rushdie’s multitudes in Midnight’s Children at times veer toward such abstract utopian stereotypes. At the same time, the newly autonomous multitudes are shown to be at the risk of being subsumed under singular platforms for imagining the nation that are violently repressive or monomaniacal. The stereotype that emerges is of a second order of the multitude, one that is enmeshed or trapped by the postcolony’s brutal fascination with and subservience to exploitative forms of sovereignty. At least initially, Rushdie’s surreal portrayal of South Asia’s multitudes is such that it could be deliberately read as an archetype for various expressions of sovereignty, both progressive and regressive, by the citizens of the new nation. As is obvious from the start, the novel is doubly obsessed with the task of reflecting the birth of the nation in the person of its protagonist, Saleem Sinai. However, this type of connection is disclosed as a dubiously self-centered “grand narrative” that must always be suspect. Saleem as India’s firstborn is also its first postcolonial citizen who is burdened with the task of reproducing the nation in keeping with the teleological discourses of liberation linked to its birth. Born at the midnight hour of India’s independence, Saleem insists that his “destinies [are] indissolubly chained to those of [his] country.” This tie between Saleem’s personal history and that of the nation is reaffirmed, we may recall, by the attention he receives from Nehru himself, the head of a secular Indian nationalism. “You are,” the first prime minister writes to Saleem, “the newest bearer of the ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.” In a sense then, Saleem’s struggle to take hold of the multitudes freed from British rule represents

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one stereotype of soft, secular democracy in South Asia. It is the collapse of this ideal that the other stereotype of the multitude effects, and that the novel itself mourns through Saleem’s disintegration. Within the scheme of the novel, Nehru’s letter is equally addressed to Shiva, Saleem’s twin, that “darkest child” of midnight with whom Saleem is exchanged at birth. Shiva’s connection to the multitude crystallizes a counterstereotype of the postcolony as virulent and overly virile at the same time. Shiva, unlike Saleem, is also explicitly identified with the “masses.” That the stereotype of the multitude is fungible is not surprising, however, because of the elasticity of magical realism as a genre. The genre itself tries to account for a multiplicity of histories, bend history itself to fiction, and embody in its very form the collectives it seeks to describe. The originary narrative of the nation that Midnight’s Children recounts from its inception is, hence, cast in doubt. Saleem, his body falling apart, struggles routinely to make himself the center of the narrative while also realizing the impossibility of this endeavor. As the premier child of midnight, his birth, he tells us, has been “prophesied” by “soothsayers,” while “newspapers celebrated [his] arrival,” and “politicos ratified [his] authenticity.” As the leader of the Midnight’s Children’s Conference, Saleem admits to wanting to assert his hold over it. “I had found,” he confides, “that I was not immune to the lure of leadership. Who found the Children, anyway? Who formed the Conference? Who gave them their meeting place? Was I not the joint-eldest, should I not receive the respect and obeisances merited by my seniority?” Indeed, he successfully gets Parvati-the-witch, another child born near the hour of midnight on August 15, to argue his case: “No, listen now everybody: without Saleem we are nowhere, we can’t talk or anything, he is right. Let him be the chief!” Yet it is the failure of his efforts to shape the future of the postcolony’s multitudes along with his conviction that he is their only legitimate leader that the novel traces. As narrator, Saleem’s struggle against the multitudes is front and center in a way that gives greatest weight to the stereotype that the collective vision of anticolonial liberation in India has failed. Saleem’s journey dislodges his hold over his empire; the multitudes he seeks to lead, the other 1,001 children of midnight who also possess supernatural gifts and convene in Saleem’s brain for the Conference, challenge his supremacy. His proposal of a “third principle” is first simply ignored. “I felt,” he

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confesses, “them slipping away from me, each distracted by his or her own life.” Even his renewed pleas that “we come together . . . we love each other, . . . we show that this, just this, this people-together . . . sticking-together-through thick-and-thin, can be a third way” is trumped by Shiva’s ridicule. This rift between Saleem and the others of midnight advances, as Kumkum Sangari notes, “a profound disillusionment with the myths of the secular-socialist nation.” Indeed, before he is finally destroyed by them, Saleem is cast as the main myth-maker translating the repressions of a colonialist past into emancipatory accounts. Rushdie writes that Saleem, as the Buddha, has “stories issuing from his mouth, beginning with a birth at midnight, and continuing unstoppably, because he was reclaiming everything, all of it, all lost histories, all the myriad complex processes that go to make a man.” What is significant to note, however, is that Saleem’s is still a hermeneutic struggle to give the multitudes a particular story on becoming free. Moreover, it is a heroic effort that depends entirely on his individuality. These stories issue from him; he believes he “creates” them by the sheer force and magic of his mind. As much as multitudes people him, when all is said and done, he is convinced of his overarching superiority. “It seemed to me then,” Saleem admits and goes on to reaffirm, “it seems to me now—that the midnight miracle had indeed been remarkably hierarchical in nature, that the children’s abilities declined dramatically on the basis of the distance of their time of birth from midnight.” In Rushdie’s novel, the multitudes refuse to be reconciled with the ideals of love, togetherness, and self-important individuality that Saleem represents. The stereotype of multitudes as “singular plurality” coheres instead into a desperate despotism about the repression of collective freedoms by individual claims to power. For instance, despite the loss of his constituency, Saleem never strays far from his conviction that he is India: “I have been a swallower of lives,” he admits early on, and “to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me.” From this point on, the narrative turns in on itself as Saleem, with renewed vigor, continues his attempt to speak for the “multitudes” in him. It is this conviction that Saleem embodies the multitudes, that he is the multitudes’ central subjectivity, that forms the basis of a stereotype about the vacuity of collective life in the postcolony. Increasingly, the narrative internalizes this collapse of the

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multitude into Saleem, leaving aside margins that cannot be reconciled to Saleem’s experience. It seems that there are no limits to Saleem’s reach. Multitudes not only jostle in him; he gives them reality: Because the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occupied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was somehow making them happen . . . which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift.

Saleem, as creator of crowds, as the masses that inhabit postcolonial India, is a ready figure in Rushdie’s parody of the self-conceited elite liberal nationalist project in India that, while vociferously arguing for democratization, also insists on the affirmative, mediating, and creative influence of the anglicized leader. While Saleem embodies a certain Gandhi-Nehruvian strain of the nationalist movement that operates on the basis of secularism, cooperation, and inclusiveness (thus his insistence that he is all of India), Shiva, his evil twin, represents another stereotype. Shiva’s hold over the multitudes, later amplified by the novel’s caricatures of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi, confirms the hypermilitant and violent face of liberal nationalism active in the postcolony. The conflict between the two—Saleem’s search for an ideal third space and Shiva’s insistence that “the world is not ideas, rich boy; . . . the world . . . is things”—typifies the two contending visions of the postcolonial nation. Saleem’s desire to compel the multitude to stand for “free will . . . hope . . . the great soul, otherwise known as mahatma” and “mankind” is dashed by Shiva, who posits another idea of collectivity. “No,” Shiva proclaims, “there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty, and have-and-lack, . . . there is only me against the world! the world . . . is things. Things and their makers rule the world. . . . For things, the country is run. Not for people. For things, America and Russia send aid; but five million stay hungry.” In this second stereotype, multitudes are divested of humanity altogether. Collectives exist in the postcolony as part of a larger global consumptive order. Through Shiva, Rushdie types an obsession with things, not people as the

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hallmark of South Asia’s collective freedom. The multitude as things is, as Brennan notes, Rushdie’s “caustic parody” that reveals a “theory about the intricate inner workings of an international political system” that South Asia appears to be slavishly following. Contrary to the immanence of multitudes that Hardt and Negri celebrate, an immanence that is energized by plural singularities, the multitude in Midnight’s Children becomes a sign of caution for the collapse of differences altogether. Aamir Mufti makes the convincing point that the novel “records the historical failure of the elite to ‘represent’ the entire nation—in both the aesthetic-semiotic and political senses of the word.” Saleem is haunted by the idea that India is too multitudinous for him to take stock of, or to guide. “I betrayed the children of midnight,” he confesses at a point about his coerced role as The Widow’s collaborator during the Emergency. “I the Founder of the Conference,” he laments, “presided over its end.” Shiva’s reaction is to forcibly reproduce multitudes without difference, as exclusive mirrors of himself: “Shiva, destroyer of the midnight children, had also fulfilled the other role . . . a new generation of children, begotten by midnight’s darkest child was being raised towards the future.” Rushdie’s representation of India’s multitudes presents a deep cynicism about its future capacity to effect any meaningful change for the nation. The multitude comes to signify a moment of possibility coincidental with decolonization that is subsequently squandered. As Mufti goes on to note: “The account of the failure of the anglicized elite to dream-up the nation in its own image is accompanied by a lingering nostalgia for the social order envisioned in that dream. . . . This nostalgia has played no small part in creating for the novel an enthusiastic constituency within the very same social class whose self-proclaimed place in society it set out to criticize.” What Mufti’s observations and the novel make clear is that the multitude represents collectives within postcolonial South Asia in a slippery fashion. It appears as a stereotype for South Asia’s boundless difference and possibility, yet one that seems foreclosed by the political crises of the present. The question remains whether the ties between secular democracy and plutocracy within which the “failure” of the multitude is mapped in the novel leave anything besides? Are the kinds of disenfranchisements that Midnight’s Children invokes, where certain collectives seem entirely left out of the postcolonial liberal paradigms

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operative in India, recuperated in alternative ways to other future orientations for the postcolony? The novel’s end certainly suggests such a possibility, although it equally evokes the imminence of an apocalypse yet to come. Midnight’s Children inaugurates an apocalyptic vision that results, as I show in the next chapters of the book, in other fictive stereotypes about the postcolony that circulate within the global imaginary. Despite Saleem’s insistence otherwise, the novel ends on a note of deep skepticism about his intimate ties to the multiplicity around him. Saleem’s ambiguous connection to the multitudes emblematizes a broad disconnect between his subject position and theirs. On the one hand, the self-centered narrative that doubles as its protagonist’s autobiography and a fictive history of nation making uses the emasculated poster child of independence as a placeholder for all the innumerable citizens of midnight. He sees himself as their “creator.” They “jostle” in him, and, as the transcendental Buddha figure, he takes it upon himself to tell their stories. Yet, by the close of the novel, this voice that presumes to speak for all of India is itself extinguished by the “whirlpool of the multitudes.” This is how Midnight’s Children ends: I have been so-many too-many persons, . . . Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation . . . because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times . . . [to] be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

This ending, Saleem and his voice “trampled” by the multitudes, of course, is no end at all. The force of magical realism in this moment, refracted through the multitude, attests instead to “the very multiplicity of India” and, as Sangari goes on to say, “beyond India” to “the multifaceted nature of reality itself.” What is clear nevertheless is that a stereotype of the postcolony is yoked to the multitude. This stereotype maintains an emphatic picture of the multitude as burgeoning in numbers—“one two three, four hundred million five hundred six”—and bearing tremendous force. Striking also is its long reach into the future; many generations,

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Saleem predicts, will be at its mercy. The one thing that the force of the multitude seems to have no regard for is the illegitimacy or legitimacy of its heirs. MULTITUDES AND CARNAL POWER

The specter of an ever-expanding population equated with South Asia has particular resonance with the emergence of multitude theory. For one, it is important to observe that the multitude is imagined as “flesh” and its potential for shaping social terrain is inextricably linked to its carnality. Hardt and Negri describe the multitude as both a source of an immense, transformative power and as “flesh” incarnate: “The flesh of the multitude is pure potential, an unformed life force, and in this sense an element of social being, aimed constantly at the fullness of life. From this ontological perspective, the flesh of the multitude is an elemental power that continuously expands social being, producing in excess of every traditional political-economic measure of value.” The collective vitality that Hardt and Negri allocate to the multitude is formed through its capacity to generate and regenerate life in excess of how value is abstracted or life reduced to the form of labor within capitalist economies. The “life force” of the multitude is insubordinate to capitalism’s logic because its resilience derives from an unruly hyperproductivity that is part of life itself. The multitude’s flesh is “always excessive with respect to the value that capital can extract from it because capital can never capture all of life,” write Hardt and Negri. Thus, life is figured as the preeminent site of the multitudes’ power. As such, it is rendered in excessive terms for describing the power that multitudes unleash. Manifest as flesh, metaphors of regeneration, reproduction, and genealogical surplus come to designate its unchained potential. The optimism of Hardt and Negri’s Empire in celebrating the multitude’s unmatched capacity to resist the ubiquitous and totalizing effects of globalization is notable. Others have argued expansively and convincingly about the utopian underpinnings of Empire and specifically about the amorphous forms of the multitudes that Hardt and Negri invoke. What I consider instead is the unmediated register of primal reproduction from which the multitude in Empire draws its political agency. The multitude’s reproductive force is peculiarly adaptable to stereotypes of

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the postcolony’s multitudinous state. It is this stereotype of South Asia as overrun by a fecund multitude, for instance, that energizes narratives about the kind of difference (to globalization, individualism, etc.) and recalcitrance that this region could come to represent. Before turning to these larger points, however, it may be worth thinking about the passages between reproductivity and recreation that constitute the multitude’s power in this theory of its biopolitics. The multitude, despite its other forms of agency, is endowed with an organic structure of affect and struggle. Its insurgencies against power are discernible, as Hardt and Negri make clear, mainly in the capacity of laboring bodies to reproduce themselves above and beyond the conditions of participation in the processes of capitalist production. The multitude’s creative potential to reform the world, it seems, depends on its ability to regenerate itself. Rather than imagined solely as “immanent desire” expressed by a collective “will to resist,” the multitude is also conceived as multitudinous bodies simply “beyond measure,” which are “directly opposed to Empire, with no mediation.” “Empire,” in this account, is the name Hardt and Negri give to the late stage of global capitalism in which our lives are mired. This design of multitudes to boundlessly oppose Empire depends on its ability to sustain its own organic heft infinitely, which is what makes it a life force to be reckoned with. Hence, the “creative activity” of the multitudes that “constantly re-creates the world,” the new proletariat’s enjoining work with regeneration, is given as a “chromosomal” aggregate. Further, the multitude’s potential to exceed the “time of production” hinges on “the time of reproduction.” The multitude’s affective afterlife, in other words, proceeds from the incipient moment of its continuous births (“the posse produces the chromosomes of its future organization”), which is taken as one of the conditions for its prolonged impact on the socius. This means there is in Empire an assignation of materiality to the multitude that is narrowly elaborated from a premise of heterosexual reproduction and, indeed, heteronormativity. Multitudes, in Hardt and Negri’s treatise, are easily stripped of location, divested of history so to speak, because their very conception, that they are continually being born, is presumed as the universal attribute of all humans. This is what sidelines the necessity to see multitudes as conditioned by alternate and localized ways of belonging. Instead the

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“concrete universal” of the multitude dialectically discloses multitudes—now a buzz word for humanity—from the particular act of self(re)generation beyond the necessities of historical circumstance to a universal placeholder for life itself. “The concrete universal,” the authors note, “is what allows the multitude to pass from place to place.” Multitudes, as concept-metaphors in Empire, need not be defined at all because in all of their nomadic shiftiness, their rootless passing from place to place, they still simply “reproduce the entire world,” and this is the predicate of their force. “It is sufficient,” Hardt and Negri exalt, “to look at the contemporary development of the multitude and dwell on the vitality of its present expressions. When the multitude works, it produces autonomously and reproduces the entire world of life.” The circumstances attached to reproducing life itself remain inscrutable. Sexual difference also may be broached as an aside. Of course, this critique of Empire is misdirected. It could be argued that Hardt and Negri simply rehearse Marx’s ideas about capitalist reproduction in investing the multitude with unique reproductive value. The claim that Hardt and Negri overemphasize the vitality of life or the multitudes’ primacy in the creation process could well be a deliberate misreading of the terms of the game they have inherited from Marx. Consider what Marx has written in Capital, vol. 1, chapter 23 about the process of capital’s reproduction: “Whatever the social form of the production process, it has to be continuous, it must periodically repeat the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction.” Must we not concede that Hardt and Negri are allowing similar assumptions as Marx about labor and production, and that they are describing a process of capitalist accumulation that has little to do with humans reproducing themselves? They may well be drawing attention, as does Marx, to the need at the heart of capitalism to reproduce always the conditions of production itself. This objection presumes Hardt and Negri, mutatis mutandis, as Marx. More importantly, it removes Marx from Marx, as do the authors of Empire. If we remember that the young Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 made an effort to distinguish “species being” from “species life” we can see the

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difference between the kind of revolution Marx envisions and the kind the multitude represents. For example, later in Capital, volume 3, Marx critically separates “the realm of necessity” in which the “reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite” from the “realm of freedom,” which is the inscrutable place of reflection on human development that lies “beyond” necessity, “beyond the sphere of material production proper.” Hardt and Negri, however, articulate a nebulous collapse of this distinction for multitude theory. Hence, they advocate a “social wage” that is no longer tied to the abstraction of surplus value in the circuit of capital, which is to say they disengage labor itself from the production process. The multitude’s immanent power allows Hardt and Negri the easy latitude to speak of a “social wage” where it is assumed that the “distinction between production and reproductive labor” has “faded” and that in postmodernity the “entire multitude, even those who are unemployed, . . . produces” in the same sense. The multitude producing ubiquitously, without differentiation, is confirmed only by the conditions of its own organic reproduction rather than, as in Marx, “the total process of capital reproducing itself . . . as reproduced revenue.” What results is a radically different conception of how capitalism structures the globe and defines political and social life in the global south. Marx grasps the salience of the commodification of labor— indeed, of human bodies abstracted for value—as the ground zero of exploitation. In a Marxist account, then, the global south locates the fault lines of an international division of labor. Multitude theorists, however, posit that life’s visceral forms are ultimately beyond the capture of capital even as life’s lived excesses are rendered visible by capital’s ineffectual attempts to subsume all life to it. The multitudinous global south by this account serves as an example of the exceptional fecundity that reproduces life as subject to, and yet always in excess of, capitalism. As Hardt and Negri proclaim, “when the flesh of the multitude is imprisoned and transformed into the body of global capital, it finds itself both within and against the processes of capitalist globalization.” In the closing sections of this chapter I consider what the differences between work and immanence, Marx and the theorists of Empire, and labor and multitude mean to the lives we encounter in fiction about the South Asia, how we read the excess significations of certain stereotypes, and how we understand their flattening.

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Saleem’s life in Midnight’s Children is certainly excessively drawn. His abundant life stories replicate the life forces associated with the multitude to offer us a vision of India’s multiplicity through this one life. Saleem, who we are told has the “gift of inventing parents  .  .  . whenever necessary,” can claim only a muddled, over-the-top genealogy. As the secret bastard child of Methwold, an Englishman with French lineage, and an Indian woman, Vanita, who is a slum-dweller, Saleem is also a surrogate child. Among his many other parents are his Catholic nurse, Mary, who, instigated by the revolutionary zeal of her lover, Joseph, switches him at birth with Shiva. Oblivious to all these muddles, he is raised as their son by Amina and Ahmed Sinai, both well-off Muslims. Aside from this mix-up of birth that results in a marvelously multiple lineage, Saleem also typifies the novel’s various allegories that excessively reproduce “nation” through “citizen.” Lauded by Nehru at the moment of his arrival, Saleem’s birth is enfolded in the Gandhian movement as a political form that deliberately circumscribes the vast variety of life as it is lived in the postcolony. Rushdie is clear about Saleem’s inclusive, Mahatma-like identification: “I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come.” In this and other such moments, Saleem focalizes the multitude as a stereotype for India’s lived excesses. Particularly calling attention to the multitudes around him, Saleem claims that “each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude  .  .  . to understand me you’ll have to swallow a world.” The multitude condenses the place of individuality and commonality as endlessly recursive; indeed, Saleem, like India itself, seems caught in its vortex. The main metaphor that signals Saleems’s postindependence perversion of Gandhian nationalism—exposing his delusions about his complete absorption by the nation’s multitudes—is procreative. If multitudes derive their transformative capacities through reproduction, their success or failure typically rides on stereotypes that are explicitly gendered. That Saleem is impotent and therefore cannot be expected to “rescue the nation” as he dreams of doing is what severs his ties with India’s multitudes. The difference between Saleem and the secular-pacifist ideology

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he transforms through inheritance lies in their varied responses to nationalist imperatives of masculinity. In The Intimate Enemy, Ashis Nandy has famously written of the “hermaphroditic radicalism” of Mohandas Gandhi’s anticolonial mission. Nandy argues that “it was colonial India, still preserving something of its androgynous cosmology and style, which ultimately produced a transcultural protest against the hyper-masculine world view of colonialism, in the form of Gandhi.” According to Nandy, Gandhi’s ahimsa, or nonviolence, tapped into a dormant, antimodern tradition of myths in India that were also decidedly incommensurable with the overly stereotyped forms of heteronormative masculinity furthered under colonialism. Gandhi’s political impetus came, Nandy suggests, through a collaborative consensus between this kind of indigenous mythology and rising critiques against sexual imperialism in the metropole itself. However, as Leela Gandhi, writing on queer sexuality in India, astutely notes, “Gandhi’s religious hermaphroditism, however, does not signify the zone of a transgressive sexuality, but projects sexlessness—true brahmacharya.” For Saleem, the inheritor of this tradition in postcolonial India, sexlessness is not an option. Saleem, in fact, not only desires to fashion multitudes in his image, he is also plagued by incestuous desire: for his mother, Amina; for his aunt Pia; and for his sister, Jamila. Even his “lie of impotence,”—“I can’t marry anyone, Pictureji, I can’t have children”—results in his forced adoption of a son, Aadam, the biological child of Parvati-the-witch and Shiva, Saleem’s nemesis. Saleem’s fate is sealed when he, along with all the other children of midnight, is forcibly neutered by Indira Gandhi’s autocratic regime. For Rushdie, as for Saleem, Saleem’s sterility signals the failure of the softer side of the Indian national dream. The end of the procreative metaphor, it seems, must also end the magic and promise of the postcolonial multitudes: “the children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing themselves . . . and whispering through the wall came . . . the tormented cry of children who had lost their magic . . . she had cut it out of us, . . . now we were nothing . . . gone forever, . . . the originally-one-thousand-and-one marvelous promises of a numinous midnight.” As in Hardt and Negri, multitudes are not of much consequence in Rushdie’s work unless they can self-perpetuate. Rushdie’s critique is clear: Gandhi’s form of obscure asexuality cannot, as Saleem cannot, sustain itself in independent India.

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Saleem finally confesses, “In fact my dream of saving the country was a thing of mirrors and smoke; insubstantial, the maunderings of a fool.” The secular-pacifist project in Midnight’s Children fails, in the terms of the novel, because it accommodates native effeminacy and lacks a confident, procreative masculinity. Rushdie’s indictment of the other nationalist program, represented in the novel’s triad by Indira, Sanjay, and Shiva, is just as sharp. Here the multitude, left over after Saleem’s colossal failure, is a dark and brooding bunch, cloaked in illegitimacy and class contempt. Confused genealogies and mysterious birth circumstances collude to make Shiva Saleem’s fantastic alter ego. Saleem’s life is haunted by this figure, both fierce and pathetic, who struggles all his life “against-the-crowd” to reclaim the privilege Saleem had stolen from him at birth. Shiva’s is a violent protest against the inequities of his life; as a stereotype of Rushdie’s making, he comes to stand as the sign under which the legacy of violent anticolonial nationalism resurfaces in postcolonial India. If Gandhian passivity won “hearts and minds” during the final years of British rule and is stereotyped in Saleem, then Shiva, the war hero, the major who slaughters by droves, stands in as the new and equally distorted face of militant anticolonial nationalism transported into the postcolonial scene. To Saleem, he ultimately “becomes a sort of opposing principle” that represents “all the vengefulness and violence and simultaneous-love-andhate-of-Things in the world.” This principle in the novel—destructive as it is, caught in a circle of greed and need—also engenders its own multitude. Both Saleem’s pacifism and Shiva’s violence are for Rushdie, not paradoxically, symptoms of failure. Whereas Saleem fails because he is sterile, Shiva fails because of his omnipotence: “I laughed because Shiva, destroyer of the midnight children, had also fulfilled the other role lurking in his name, the function of Shiva-lingam, of Shiva-the procreator, so that at this very moment, in the boudoirs and hovels of this nation, a new generation of children, begotten by midnight’s darkest child, was being raised towards the future. Every Widow [Indira Gandhi] manages to forget something important.” Rushdie’s coming-of-age novel about India essentially ends on this bleak note. India, it appears, exists in hordes as inscrutable, amorphous multitudes whose national lives ebb and flow in relation to their access to a primitive cycle of creation. If the failure of Gandhian nationalism,

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Rushdie implies, is to be mourned in the ineffectuality and death of our hero, Saleem, then the failure of Indian democracy is sown in the genetic militancy of the country’s political history. COLLECTIVES BESIDE THE NATION: FUZZY MULTITUDES

Despite the biological anchors of the multitude that lend anthropological force to stereotypes about them, multitudes are also imagined as elusive collectives that exceed the conditions of their formation. Multitudes may be “flesh,” but they also enjoin life and living to ways of being in common. That is, their revolutionary impetus comes from the quotidian commonalities that are collectively shared such as habits, aspirations, and vernaculars. This “common productive flesh of the multitude” may be penetrated by commodity culture, but Hardt and Negri hold that it is also expressive of “common” potentials that designate collective life in quotidian ways. It is this—the endurance of common forms of communication and habits for instance—that they see as signaling the potential for multitudes to serve as an “alternative to the global political body of capital.” The basis of the common is to be found in shared “languages, symbols, ideas,” and habits—“the daily experience, practices, [and] conduct” that “serves as the basis of life.” Taken together, common habits and languages produce the “social” dimension of the multitude that is also part of its life force. These attributes of the multitude become voluble in the context of the sexual and class politics of Midnight’s Children, especially when one considers the ways in which the theoretical potential of multitudes is conceptually determined by reproductive desire and yet cannot be corralled to an entirely corporeal understanding of life. Collectives of queers, women, and ghetto dwellers that appear in Midnight’s Children evidence the proliferation of other kinds of life that multitudes stand for, in which common aspirations and quotidian ways of existing take precedence over the multitude’s biopolitical being. In a way, these shadowy collectives reveal a tension between different collective stereotypes that circulate as representations of the postcolony. If the multitude is “flesh,” it is also a form of “subjectivity  .  .  . produced through cooperation” and the common interests of the social body. It is this kind of split over the stereotype of the multitude even within

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fiction that provokes very divergent outcomes of how these stereotypes are understood to reflect on South Asia. Aside from anxieties about the failure of liberal visions of democracy for the postcolony’s future, the double stereotype of the multitude as reproducing recognizable forms of national and subjective life while also capturing forms of community that exist beside these lenses keeps open the question about how these stereotypes should be read. Part of the backstory for why the multitude should function so perfectly as a stereotype that designates South Asia as a cohort of legible and illegible collectives relates to how social organization was managed and disrupted under colonialism. As Partha Chatterjee argues in The Nation and Its Fragments, colonial discourse historically invested in a process of enumeration and codification that reaffirms the validity of certain communities while obfuscating others. The ambivalence of such enumerated multitudes is emblematic of a colonial strategy that, while allowing “solidarities to slide from one particular form to another,” still avows a programmatic “kinship,” “origin,” or “destiny” as its defining narrative principle. That Saleem and Shiva invoke certain well-defined forms of national collectives evidences the desire in this fiction to make the postcolony easily recognizable in terms of its inherited legacies. Chatterjee, making a distinction between “fuzzy” and “enumerable” communities, suggests that the practice of colonial accounting or codification lends a manufactured stability to how collectives linked to the colony and postcolony are perceived in terms of their continuity. For instance, collective identifications are authenticated on the basis of colonial census taking and archival records that attest to their legitimacy. Referencing Sudipta Kaviraj, Chatterjee writes: A fundamental change effected in the . . . domain of modern politics in the colonial period was the impoverishment of the earlier “fuzzy” sense of community and an insistence upon the identification of community in the “enumerable” sense. . . . Earlier communities were fuzzy, in the sense that, first a community did not claim to represent or exhaust all the layers of selfhood of its members, and second, the community . . . did not require its members to ask how many of them were in the world.

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Chatterjee’s larger claim that colonial regimes enforce a calculated shift away from fuzzy communities ultimately has an impact on how collectives are seen as recognizable or hidden within the postcolonial state. Even within Rushdie’s fiction of India, some communities appear only in their fuzziness. These fuzzy collectives represent multitudes as the coming together of collectives with a common stance. They also further the idea that there are communities in the postcolony that evidence the strain of being properly inserted into modern regimes of power. Certainly the strain of converting fuzzy collectives into enumerable ones troubles Rushdie’s prose significantly as he moves, always ambivalently, between linear and cyclical time (“tick tock, tick tock” versus “pickled time”), between fictive and found genealogies, between distinct and indistinct multitudes. Rushdie himself notes his effort to keep the novel open-ended. Midnight’s Children, he writes, “goes in great loops and circles back on itself, repeats earlier things, digresses” in order to emphasize its parallels with unscripted oral forms of storytelling. Such narrative digressions, characteristic of the magical mode, channel “fuzzy” communities whose unique forms of “communication” sustain the lifeworlds also distinctive to the existence of multitudes. Traces of loosely configured collectives (whose layers of selfhood are not exhausted by their being queer, women, or poor) remain in Midnight’s Children alongside or beside the force of the narrative of the nation that tells of other multitudinous comings of age. Eve Sedgwick’s eclectic book Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity offers a way of thinking of the parallel stereotypes of community or multitudes both in Rushdie’s fiction and in the Indian national imaginary. While Sedgwick’s engagement is limited to an exploration of queer sexuality in the U.S. context, her theoretical deployment of the term “beside” is useful, I find, as a space-clearing gesture. The term conceptually locates some of the stereotypes (of multitudes, slums, death, etc.) about fuzzy collectives that are “beside” more dominant ones that tell the story of postcolonial national consciousness. Sedgwick writes: The most salient preposition in Touching Feeling is probably beside. . . . Beside is an interesting preposition also because there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them.  .  .  . Its [beside’s] interest does not,

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however, depend on a fantasy of metonymically egalitarian or even pacific relations. . . . Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.

I borrow “beside” from Sedgwick to locate the spaces where queers, working women, and the urban poor dwell in Rushdie’s work as well as within the hallowed discourses of nationalist and colonialist histories. I find this term particularly useful because it goes beyond the concrete universal mode of conceptualizing multitudes in calling attention to the parallel proximity of alternate “fuzzy” communities. In addition, the passing notice with which Rushdie writes these other fuzzy multitudes into his fiction of India is largely reflective of their (il)legibility within postcolonial India even today. Thinking of them as stereotypes that exist alongside or beside the mainframe of Rushdie’s novel enables a further claim about the ethical affects that their partial visibility invokes. MULTITUDES OF QUEERS

Although Midnight’s Children is preoccupied by the narrator’s entanglement with the twin trajectories of the Indian nationalist movements, Saleem’s (pre)history hints at the possibility of alternate communities within the nation. These alternatives figure in the novel as moments of crises that intersect the postcolonial nation’s attempts to accommodate itself to the narrative of capital. Alongside Gandhi’s Quit India movement and Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s more militant Muslim League, Rushdie gives us a glimpse of a collective that does not turn on the ambiguous disavowal and avowal of native heteronormative masculinity. Saleem’s grandfather, Adam Aziz, moves to Agra and, struck by “optimism fever,” enthusiastically joins with Mian Abdullah (the Hummingbird), who leads a motley group explicitly opposed to the Partition plan being advocated by the Muslim group. The Hummingbird’s charisma and passion for his cause, we are told, is directly connected to his work habits and his ability to provoke same-sex desire. “Mian Abdullah had the strange trait of humming without pause. . . . [His] hum rose and fell in direct relationship to his work rate  .  .  . and when it rose to its highest, most

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feverish pitch, it had the ability of inducing erections in anyone within its vicinity.” What we have in this moment in the text is an intertwining of labor and sexual desire that for once does not enter the procreative process. Unlike Gandhi’s sexless nonviolent movement and its opposite militant platform, the Hummingbird’s program normalizes other forms of desire within the nation. In this sense the multitude here is imagined as radically formed through common ties that are pointedly beside the protocols of a nation imagined exclusively through kinship bonds. This alternate form of the multitude arranged around common cause is also endowed with a degree of political agency. Much before Saleem convenes his conference of the midnight progeny, the Hummingbird holds a very different kind of convocation: “Mian Abdullah had created the Free Island Convocation almost single-handedly. . . . It had been a great conjuring trick. . . . The marquees would be filled with members of the agrarian movements, urban labourers’ syndicates, religious divines and regional groupings.” The Free Island Convocation does not attract its followers through hierarchical claims to births and origins. Rather, in this moment of “optimism,” Rushdie seems, albeit temporarily, to acknowledge subaltern collectives. The convocation notably draws both agrarian and urban workers. The heterodox placing together of minority collectives, where the work of a queer collective attracts marginalized workers from other sectors, is indeed a moment of “optimism” within the text. Rife with narrative options—the Hummingbird’s hum resonates in Saleem’s grandfather, Adam, and in Nadir Khan, the poet without rhyme. It seems that by depicting such a multitude fictionally, Rushdie might still write a new novel about India’s stereotypical image. Nadir Khan, whose “ears jaws penis,” we are told, “were forever behaving according to the dictates of the Hummingbird,” is the figure who lends credence to the idea that all collectives in the postcolony are not formed on the basis of prior historical and genealogical scripts. Nadir, for example, engages Saleem’s mother, Mumtaz/Amina, in an “underground” marriage, full of love but no sex. In a sense, he too functions as Saleem’s surrogate parent. He later emerges in a flash as Lal Qasim, the communist leader with whom Amina continues to be enamored despite her remarriage and the dissolution of her ties to Nadir. There is a suggestion in all of this that there are untold stories besides the one of Saleem

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and Shiva in the novel. However, the stories of these minor collectives are subsumed by violence, an association that consistently haunts the appearance of multitudes whatever their guise. In the case of queer collectives that the novel portrays beside the nation, the Hummingbird is killed by dogs in a bloody assassination, Adam Aziz disappears in the solipsism of senility, and Nadir Khan simply vanishes. The “optimism fever” Rushdie initially describes as a symptom of this collective turns inward, pathologized as the “optimism disease.” The transformation of Nadir Khan—poet, activist, and Hummingbird’s confidante—into husband and father to Saleem points to a masquerade in which one idea of the collective identity in the postcolony is forcibly elided by another. To the extent that it does so, homosexuality in the postcolony adopts a colonial script ultimately stereotyped as a variation of the heteronorm. Gender role-playing, children, and marriage thus are the habits to which the Free India Convocation succumbs, as does Saleem and the other children of midnight. For a writer who confesses to wanting to “write about sex” and who has been lauded as a defender of “ethnic cross-dressing,” this failure is striking in the vision of the postcolony it extends for its Anglophone readers. In what follows, I broadly outline some of the overarching plays within Rushdie’s evolving oeuvre that sketch the same stereotypes about dystopic sexual collectives that jostle against the notion that these same collectives may help us query the inequities of a global world order. The Satanic Verses, for instance, is a novel of contest that, among other things, pits the Anglophile, empire-loving Saladin Chamcha against the heterotopic migrant Gibreel Farishta. While Farishta embodies a hypermasculine heterosexuality that acts out its phantasmic aggression on an inversely feminized Britain, Chamcha, humiliated by immigration police in a van and the object of racist and homosexist derision, has to accept “emasculation” as just desserts for acquiescing to cultural conquest. Yet it is Chamcha whose symbolic appearance as “goat man” with horns is co-opted into ambivalently commercial but explicitly antiracist protest against the treatment of refugees in London. The Ground Beneath Her Feet stages a parallel recuperation of native, heterosexual masculinity when Ormus Cama discovers homosexuality as an Occidental perversion and proceeds to undercut the “sexual deviancy” of his patron, Mull Standish, and his band of sodomic drug cops by initiating a vengeful relationship

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with Standish’s Orientalist ex-wife’s lesbian lover. The heterosexist scope of Cama’s cultural and sexual recalcitrance to the Occident elaborates how easily collectives constituted on sexuality alone are frayed. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Aires da Gama, another antinationalist Anglophile, is a dandy in parody, a closeted, impotent homosexual with an absent father and an overbearing mother who effeminizes her sons. Aires’s transgressions are borne both of his queerness and of his class privilege and aim to unmask the hypocrisies of the latter. Despite eschewing the model of heteronormalcy, his relationship with Prince Henry disrupts the expectations of bourgeois domesticity of Carmen, his wife; yet he is in the end rescued by her. Carmen contains both Aires and Prince Henry in the closet, preferring a masquerade of the bourgeois family rather than a public exploration of alternative sexualities within the nation. This calls attention to the radical ways in which certain collectives are made absent from public life and notice, especially when their interests diverge with the overt political interests of the nation. WOMEN AT WORK: ANOTHER MULTITUDE

The insertion of “woman” as a trope in Rushdie’s fiction that furthers the continuity between colonialist repression and the postcolonial present in terms of masculine virility has received significant attention. Critics such as Inderpal Grewal, Ambreen Hai, Aijaz Ahmad, and others have quite correctly corelated Rushdie’s fatalism about the postcolonial South to the grotesque stereotypes of women in his novels. Writing on The Satanic Verses, Gayatri Spivak concludes that The Satanic Verses “is written on the register of male bonding and unbonding,” where the two male protagonists “are tortured by obsession with women, go through them, even destroy them, within a gender code that is never opened up, never questioned.” In the context of Midnight’s Children, women cohere a certain stereotype about the postcolony as fecund, feminized, and preoccupied with reproductive life. This gives us an image of how women are placed in relation to stereotypes about the postcolony as overpopulated and multitudinous, and it reveals how the gender code remains closed. Women in Midnight’s Children remain the vassals that produce and reproduce a failed postcolonialism. As a collective, Indian women have nothing better to do, it seems, than to reinvent and normalize desire in

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a masculinity that is already too beleaguered. The examples are almost too plentiful to cite. There is Amina, Saleem’s mother, first “trapped” by the weight of bearing a “midnight’s child” and then charged with the task of revitalizing her husband’s “frozen” member. And Mary Pereira, Saleem’s ayah, distracted to madness by her failure to attract the rebel, Joseph D’Costa; she is the “criminal” of the hour, switching the midnight twins at birth. She, we are told, is only “happy as an ayah with a baby to raise.” Although the successful owner of Braganza Pickles, her time of ease comes with her adoption of Saleem’s baby, Adaam. And of course there are Padma and Indira: the former prostrates herself in front of Saleem’s impotence, using prayer, herbs, and stimulation to try to cure it, while the latter, imagining his “seed” itself as threat, castrates him. This ending, however, is insufficient, and Rushdie ensures that Saleem and his counterpart are fully reinscribed within the organic life of the nation. Saleem, though impotent, is forced into fatherhood by Parvati-the-witch, while “hordes” of women seduce and bear Shiva’s bastard children! She, along with most of the other women in the novel, seem caught up in perpetuating “the web of interweaving genealogies” that is fronted as the most noticeable sign of the postcolony. In this regard, the militant women—Saleem’s estranged sister, Jamila Singer, and the Widow, who violently attempts to obliterate the hope of midnight—merely offset the indiscriminate fecundity of the “unectomied bellies” of the nation’s “great ladies and whores” preoccupied with the birth of the “legions of bastards” to come. Ultimately, Midnight’s Children reveals a profound and declarative misogyny that attempts to stereotype the postcolony as a singularly feminized and procreative multitude. Saleem’s fear that “women  .  .  . [who were] never central,” who “make and unmake” him, conditions the nation’s collapse on this idea of an unwieldy femininity. “Women have made me; and also unmade,” Saleem proclaims, adding that “I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex. It is, perhaps, a matter of connection: is not Mother India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female? And, as you know there’s no escape from her.” The implication is that fecundity and the drive to reproduction are feminized traits that result in the repeated birth of an inchoate multitude that stifles the secular democratic futures dreamed by the vanguard citizens of the postcolony.

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The obfuscation of women’s roles that Rushdie calls attention to, repeatedly stereotyping women as progenitive bearers of a now stale nationalist ideology, rehearses a point already made. As Partha Chatterjee has shown, anticolonial nationalism in India has long negotiated women’s roles in modernity and their participation within the public sphere by making selective choices for women between education and spirituality, between political activism and domesticity. In “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” Chatterjee astutely argues that women in Indian nationalist discourse were only permitted a partial and very prescribed entry into public life through limited education. On the whole, they were systematically contained within the home (also considered the repository of authentic Indian spirituality, which the colonizers could not contaminate or dominate). The value of modernity itself, for nationalists in colonial India, turned on women’s ability to frame a politics that, while addressing social conflicts on a world stage, preserves an enclosed, idealized, and feminized cultural space that lies outside the sphere of colonial influence. Such an assignation of gender responsibility is so thoroughly explained by nationalist arguments, its symbolic circuits so completely closed, that its dominant scheme is even now easily inhabited in representing India’s women. Saleem’s story, which begins and ends in the Braganza pickle factory, paradoxically elides any sustained engagement with this space of women’s labor that constitutes them in terms of common habit within the nation. Rushdie gives us glimpses of the factory and the work that women do there. But from Saleem’s narrative point of view—as the professed leader of the postcolony’s secular democratic ideals—these are always rendered as utterly fantastic and inanely jocular. The line between reality and magic is stretched taut, collapsing into stereotypes of coarse and imperious femininity at work. Saleem, remembering that he has not given us the setting of the factory that shelters and nourishes him, much less the women who run it, presents these grotesque fragments of sight and sound: I have not shown you the factory in daylight until now. This is what has remained undescribed  .  .  . the cooking-floor, where copper vats bubble and seethe, where strong-armed women stand atop wooden steps, working long-handled ladles through the knife-tang of pickle

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fumes  .  .  . sounds, too have been waiting to be heard: bubbling of vats, loud singing, coarse imprecations, bawdy humor of fuzz-armed women; the sharp-nosed thin-lipped admonitions of overseers.

What remains “undescribed” for the narrator in this and subsequent scenes of women collaboratively at work appears not relevant to the novel’s preoccupation with the nation. Spivak’s claim that “within the protocols of The Satanic Verses” present-day rural India “clings to magical realism as an alibi, and provides a clue to the politics of the writing subject” can equally be made about the protocols by which women are imprinted into Midnight’s Children. The excessive and grotesque register in which working women are cast in Rushdie’s novel makes it possible to read their narratives as always only adjacent to the nation’s narrative. MULTITUDES OF THE POOR

The poor, both urban and rural, who arguably represent India’s multitudes in their most literal terms, also represent the alternative idea of a multitude formed through coalitions and common interests. The text leans toward the possibility that the ghetto dwellers can organize a resistance to the pogroms of the Emergency in which self-interest and individual empowerment were pursued even if it meant national sterility. The magicians, as Saleem ironically calls the ghetto dwellers he lives with shortly before being trampled by the multitudes, represent “insurrectionists, public menaces, the scum of the earth—a community of the godless” among whom Saleem suddenly feels “instantly and comfortingly at home.” If only momentarily, Midnight’s Children gives the impression that a very different sense of community is engendered in slums that is at odds with notions of advancement and comfort valued by the liberal narratives of the postcolony. Rather than the heteropatriarchal anxieties that fix Saleem’s and Shiva’s attempts to take hold of the biopolitics of nation making, this moment opens the possibility of another understanding of the postcolony’s population politics. It is striking that the magician’s common subjective experience of being part of the multitudes seems to come from the magicians’ ability to read political scripts with sublime focus on their own commonality. Moreover, the inhabitants of the ghetto register this politics of locating themselves in terms of

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a common, shared affect. On one occasion when a political henchman arrives in the ghetto to proselytize on poverty bearing a poster with the slogan, “Abolish Poverty,” the ghetto dwellers unite in a common expression of mirth. Saleem describes this infectious moment set off by the reaction of his slum guru, Picture Singh: “His laughter rolled out from beneath his umbrella to infect the crowd until all of us were rolling on the ground, laughing, crushing ants, covered in dust.” This moment of shared sentience extends a vision of the multitude that is at odds with the stereotype of the teeming, hyperreproductive crowds that threaten and then finally overwhelm the idea of national liberation for South Asia that Rushdie otherwise imagines. Representing a notion of freedom produced by but not wholly in sync with the idea of an efficiently capitalized society, the ghetto dwellers ultimately remain an ambivalent collective in this very important fiction about India’s postcolonial moment. It is an ambivalence echoed by the fact that, of all of the novel’s figures, this collective remains most exactly suspended between being cast as “magical” and “real” at the same time. Saleem observes that “the magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their arts, but they never forgot what it was.” What these “arts” accomplish is what remains precisely undetermined in this novel. Rushdie’s incantation of them as utterly fantastic conduits of magic seems to strip them of any material significance. Yet the potential of this collective lingers in the suggestion that they are the best representation of India’s reality. If the “Indian disease” that the novel identifies is “this urge to encapsulate whole of Indian reality,” then the magicians who live in the ghettos stand for a version of reality that is radically different from the bourgeois ideals for the postcolony evinced by its main characters. The ghetto serves as a constellation of Rushdie’s critique of communism. Saleem concludes that “the problems of the magician’s ghetto were the problems of the Communist movement in India; within the confines of the colony could be found, in miniature, the many divisions and dissensions which racked the Party.” He dismisses them in the end for “becoming more and more bitter.” As M. Keith Booker notes, “Rushdie’s treatment of communism . . . is snide and condescending. . . . To an extent, communism functions in the text as a sort of road not taken,

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especially if one reads Saleem as an allegorical stand-in for the Indian nation.” Yet the novel is premised on the notion that Saleem’s version of India is a dubious and contested one. There are alliances such as the one between Picture Singh and the Hummingbird that are beside Saleem’s manifestly privileged one that remain only partially revealed: “one day soon,” Saleem muses, “the snake-charmer Picture Singh would follow in the footsteps of Mian Abdullah so many years ago; that like the legendary Hummingbird he would leave the ghetto to shape the future by the sheer force of his will.” Thus, Rushdie’s “joke” on communism adapted by Saleem rests uneasily alongside this idea of ghetto life where the habits and convictions held by a multitude remain antagonistic to the alliance between nation, class, and capital. CODA: MULTITUDES UNLEASHED UPON THE WORLD

The stereotype about South Asia’s multitudes that is everywhere in this influential Anglophone novel about India’s independence has an uncertain future. Of biopolitical concern, multitudes are theorized as innately generative and deviant, signaling recursive forms of “subjectivity” that are produced by and that produce “new forms of cooperation and communication” and hence subjective attachments. In a way, Midnight’s Children, as other novels that invoke the multitudinousness of postcolonial India, asks us to consider the shifting senses that give this stereotype its charge. Are the multitudes that reference South Asia simply a sign of its unrestrained growth beyond measure, a kind of population explosion that erases all vestiges of civility and claims to autonomy articulated as part of its decolonial emergence? Or does this stereotype gesture to the making of an “alternative to the geopolitical body of capital” that “force[s] us [nonetheless] to enter a new world in which we can only understand ourselves as monsters?” In other words, can the idea that South Asia is overdetermined in its multitude, and is therefore beyond seemly representation, be a critique of the form of globalization that the Anglophone novel itself represents in its attempt to reproduce previously colonized cultures for new consumption to elite English reading publics? These are the ethical concerns that remain in novels that peddle in this idea of burgeoning collectives driven by reproductive zeal and commonality of language, interests, and habits

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in the global south. Certainly these concerns are to be found as well in many of Rushdie’s diaspora novels that evidence an anxiety over how South Asia should be globally imagined. Rushdie’s critique of postcolonial India reaches a stalemate because it represents the postcolonial nation caught in a tautological anxiety about reproducing the conditions of its own production along well-defined heterosexist, nationalist lines. Communities of queers, working women, and the poor, which weren’t construed as legitimate communities by nationalist discourses of the nation, remain to trouble the main frames of how India’s multitudes are approached. Multitudes appear to attest to the postcolony’s inscrutability, not unlike the formation presented by Hardt and Negri, in which they are recognizable only through an economy of heteropatriarchal reproduction. On the other hand, they also stand for a sign of an immanence or power of a newly autonomous society that is still in formation but is as yet unrealized. The idea of the nation, especially a postcolonial one, Saleem realizes is precisely perched on the cusp between that which is terminally regressive and bursting with the possibility to newness: “August in Bombay . . . a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which . . . was quite imaginary . . . a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will . . . a collective fiction in which anything was possible; a fable rivaled by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.” The stereotype of the multitude, hovering between the immense possibilities represented by collective fictions and retrograde myths, asks that we carefully think about how its various avatars impress our opinions of this region of the world, and of the historical moment in which it asserts its claim to an identity all its own. The appearance of the schizophrenic stereotype of multitudes that I have traced in Midnight’s Children extends into Rushdie’s more “diasporic” fictions. Aside from Fury, novels such as The Satanic Verses, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and The Moor’s Last Sigh are concerned with how we read the characters’ attachments to collectives elsewhere from the West. In contrast to Midnight’s Children, these novels are marked by a diasporic migrant subjectivity that Rushdie himself claims because they all focus on nomadic characters who live life on a run around the globe, moving erratically between Bombay, Madrid, London, and New York.

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In a way, then, these works speak directly to and, indeed, interpellate the global reader more immediately into anxieties over the status and troubles that stereotypical portraits of the third world presage. It is significant that even these works that deliberately turn toward the global refract a politics of nation and reproduction as the predominant concerns of the postcolony and of postcolonial subjects. The main observation that can be made is that the stereotype of the multitude continually fluctuates. At one moment its measure seems to be formed by the basis of its semblances with the utopian expectations of anticolonial liberation. At the next, it is the sign of untrammeled excesses and deep deprivations that are the dark ends of neo-imperialism. Both these versions of the multitude, as I show over the course of the next few chapters, return as other equally compelling stereotypes about the postcolony.

3 SLUMDOG OR WHITE TIGER? THE ABJECTION AND ALLURE OF SLUMS

Amir: Why does everyone love this program [Kaun Benega Crorepathi/Who Wants to Be a Millionaire]? Latika: To escape isn’t it? To walk into another life. Doesn’t everyone want that? —Slumdog Millionaire, 2008

And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. —Adiga, The White Tiger, 2008

Danny Boyle’s popular film Slumdog Millionaire and Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize–winning novel The White Tiger both stake their success on reflecting the flashy opportunism and stark inequality of globalization in India. If, as I argue in the previous chapter, the fecundity of a burgeoning and unruly population is a core stereotype that persists in novels about the subcontinent’s first moments of freedom, slum life seems to be the most captivating stereotype for imagining India’s global rise. The jostling crowds of midnight, it could be said, come of age in slums, scrabbling to survive the nation’s fast track toward a modernity that is increasingly transnational. Essentially unhomed by the process of decolonization, the multitudes’ only option, we’re given to imagine, is to squat. The predominant image of globalization’s uneven effects on South Asia is the stereotype of squatter colonies—the multitudes’ last habitat. In turn, the slum

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stereotype electrifies the notion that a certain grab-and-hustle attitude is the only tactic for survival available to the vast majority as postcolonial nations attend to the pressures of late-modern economies. Indeed, as newly resurgent stereotypes about the social landscape of South Asia, representations of slums and slumming serve as capacious signs for how the problems of a globalizing postcolony are understood. Literary and filmic stereotypes of slums associated with South Asia in particular, but the global south more generally, channel the prospect of globalization in the region itself as a series of chance interferences, now revealing the desires and promises of a good life, and next its anxieties and perils. The big conceit of Slumdog Millionaire, its main narrative device, is a game of chance. The opening scene reveals Jamal Malik, the protagonist, caught in the glare of television lights, facing the ultimate question as a contestant in an Indian version of the game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? All we’re told is that Jamal, a chaiwallah who ferries cups of tea to all the workers at one of Mumbai’s numerous call centers, is on the verge of winning a million rupees. From this point on, the film cuts back and forth through a series of flashbacks between each question and Jamal’s life before the game. Jamal’s ascent toward the jackpot, it seems, depends on his gritty survival on the streets of Mumbai, much of it spent hustling in slums. Jamal knows the answers to all the increasingly obscure quiz questions, the film suggests, because of a mix of luck, wit, and invention peculiar only to “slumdogs.” Forced from a young age to forage an existence on the city’s streets, Jamal, his brother Salim, and his friend Latika have encountered and survived extreme criminality and violence: communal riots, syndicated mafias, human traffickers, drugs, smuggling, prostitution, and more. The story itself is propelled forward by their astute and fortuitous escapes from these continual threats toward the moment Jamal lands his most fantastic chance to “escape”; if he plays the game well, he can literally reinvent himself or “walk into another life.” The resulting stereotype of slum life that emerges in the film is one that aligns survival in the fast paced global economy of India with a survival instinct supposedly distinct to street life. Success for Jamal, in the glitzy world of big money and television game shows, which is the metaphor for globalization operative here, rides on a blend of fear, cunning, acquisitiveness, and industriousness ostensibly cultivated by his escapades in slumming.

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Just as Slumdog frames Jamal’s story as a “rags to raja” one, a point made mockingly in the film by the game show host, Adiga’s novel lays bare the sly secrets of the triumphal transformation of one Balram Halwai, aka White Tiger, from servant to self-styled entrepreneur. As in the film, Balram’s ability to “switch sides” also depends largely on his perceptions of slum life. In a series of letters addressed to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, Balram discloses the risky transactions he makes to initiate his changed fortunes from driver to start-up guru. What is significant is that Balram’s experience of slum life—his ability to see himself mirrored in it while remaining marginally apart—is the catalyst not only for his journey but also for the ways in which he is able to game the system. Unlike Jamal, who is a “slumdog,” Balram ekes out an existence on its threshold. For both, however, as for those who enter into these fictions, slums appear as zero-sum stereotypes that anxiously mediate between the real and fantastic contradictions of globalization in South Asia. For one, slum life is stereotypically understood to generate the kind of ingenuity, desire, and self-interest that almost magically fuels these narratives toward improbably resplendent capitalist futures. As Anand Giridharadas writes of Slumdog, the film’s buoyant message is tied to “the myth of self-making spread[ing] to India.” It is no surprise that Balram’s mantras are as follows: “I am in the Light,” “I am tomorrow. . . . I am a self-taught entrepreneur.” For another, the same stereotype invokes a real terrain of poverty, disease, and dysphoric community as its ethical horizon. In some measure, then, stereotypes of slums, such as the ones in contemporary global representations of South Asia that I discuss here, force us to contemplate the utopian assumptions of global capitalism for the postcolony. Zygmunt Bauman suggests that the experience of globalization itself may be understood as a radical divide between two types of consumers: tourists and vagabonds. The relation between them, he maintains, is a paradoxical one marked by fear (“the vagabond is the tourist’s nightmare”) and pleasure (“the life of the tourists would not be half as enjoyable as it is, were there no vagabonds around”). Tourists fear yet need vagabonds, Bauman contends, because of their mutual recognition; they are, in other words, each others’ “alter ego.” By this account, globalization both produces and thrives on this dependency where tourists fear “becoming” vagabonds and yet need them to validate their own social lives. Stereotypes of slums that circulate in global fictions about

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South Asia reinforce this Manichean yet mutually constitutive sense of the socius. Indeed, Slumdog and The White Tiger are only the latest in a long line of slum fictions one might count in this genre. In film, Boot Polish (1954), Chakra (1981), Salaam Bombay! (1988), Born into Brothels (2004), and the more recent Dhobi Ghat (2010) are a handful of prominent examples in a long line of Bollywood, arthouse, and international films that have capitalized on the slum theme. In fiction, Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, Mohammed Hanif ’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People are just a few of the more recent novels that represent slums as an innate aspect of postcolonial South Asia. Stereotypes in such fictions exploit the Anglophone reader’s touristic fascinations with and, indeed, dependencies on what might be thought of as vagabond worlds. To put it another way, these films and novels are a form of tourism that reveal the fears and depravities that tourists themselves associate with vagabond life, especially in newly developing nations. Yet they do so by a reverse mechanism in which voyeurism into the lives of vagabonds doubles as way of witnessing the making of new tourists. Still, this model of the psychosocial aspects of globalization that Bauman provides does not exhaust the elasticity or effect that the ubiquity of slum fictions have on our idea of the global south. Stereotypes about slums in these works in fact also point to their own fictionality as part of the circuits of globalization. In this sense, they draw attention to and even query a general symptom of modernity in which our imaginative engagement with the world, be it through films or novels or game shows, is mediated by commodification. That slum stereotypes straddle a tenuous line between fantasies about globalization and the realities they convey confounds any sense of the sharp divide that Bauman designates between the two worlds of excess and lack. So, even as Jamal and Balram “escape” the slums that make them, each narrative takes a different temperature of their success. Jamal’s win is scripted in terms of a romantic achievement; he literally gets the money and the girl. A perfect romantic hero, Jamal never crosses the line between cleverness and corruption. Cunning and chance cohere as a romance about the unpredictable yield of globalizing societies even when they are shot through with social differences. In this sense, Slumdog perfectly circumscribes the genre of

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romance narratives that proceed through fantasies of quest, improbable adventure, and happy resolution. Jamal’s quest as a slumdog, which also serves as the main narrative anchor for the film’s audience, involves a dialectical encounter with the most harrowing experiences of poverty only so that they can be overcome in triumphant fashion in a story resolutely committed to individuated upward mobility. Some critics have thus read Jamal’s triumph in enabling terms as “the experimental expression of urban possibility” contained in the film. Others have seen in it the film’s embrace of a problematic “neoliberal optimism.” Balram, on the other hand, is remarkable because he is unscrupulous. His success comes from his stealthy and willful subversion of his master’s, Ashok’s, control over him. “I slit Mr. Ashok’s throat,” Balram confesses early on, a blunt declaration that immediately sets the dark tone of the novel. Balram’s model of violent entrepreneurship is, as Hal Crowther notes, “a mid-night black satire” of how globalization works in South Asia. Scott Medintz, reviewing the novel for the New York Sun, aptly notes that The White Tiger is “a fascinating glimpse beneath the surface of an Indian economic ‘miracle’ . . . and a meticulously conceived allegory of the creative destruction that’s driving globalization.” Unlike Jamal, who proves at every turn to be a sympathetic hero, Balram is, to echo Adrian Turpin a “sympathetic psychopath.” Ultimately, stereotypes of slumming that circulate in Anglophone representations of South Asia wrap themselves around two incommensurable notions of what we might call “slum magic.” The presence of slums appears to fracture narratives of development, whether of colonialism or globalization, from the inside. One has only to recall Kipling’s famous tour of Colootollah, “the lowest sink of all,” in the company of a colonial policeman to realize the extent to which his characterization of Kolkata as the “City of Dreadful Night” gives away the lie of colonialism’s civilizing influence. Located as the most abject spaces of human existence, the proximity of slums to iconic representations of development—colonial clubs or malls or multinational corporations—crystallize a bifurcated vision of liberal modernity. Stereotypes of slum life represent the unending allure of desire and drive associated with globalization. The desire to escape slums, the fear that comes with being linked to them, come to stand more expansively for the desire to be free. Imaginative representations of slums render this desire to compulsively pursue one’s desire as a

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version of freedom in which the endless cycle of consumption is exalted as a hallmark of global subjectivity and as an end in itself. Slums produce, these stereotypes suggest, a hectic aspiration in its inhabitants to become “ideal consumers.” They compel in them a kind of desire for desire itself and with it the kinds of highly individual, improvisational, and even quasi-magical innovations essential to the sustenance of globalization. Indeed, both Slumdog and The White Tiger reflect this kind of hypermotivation on the parts of their characters. The extent to which this kind of desire both maps and transfers to the bourgeois, first-world aspirations of consumers of these texts provides a key to why these texts have such widespread purchase. Moreover, this identification over illicit and daring forms of desire enlivened by self-interest initiates a form of mimetic mirroring between viewers, readers, and narrative that yokes them to each other in a common enterprise. In short, such narratives solicit those who enter them to revel, along with their characters, in the jouissance of ideal consumerism. In these stories, slums become a springboard for affirming serendipitous success stories directed toward a well-known future not only in keeping with the narrative’s internal logic but also as validation of a liberal consuming public. Yet stereotypes about slums also come to represent the dead ends of the story of globalization; they serve as indices of failure and locations for possible alternative imaginings of community that, however hesitantly, delicately ask us to reconsider whether a selfinterested globalization is the only viable option for postcolonial worlds. DESTINATION SLUM: JOINING FICTIONAL POVERTY TOURS

Stereotypes about slums in general fluctuate between two conflicting associations of slums as places of prolific danger, dirt, and criminality and as places of creativity, community, and compassion. In their prevalence in South Asian fiction, slum stereotypes skirt back and forth between a spectrum of such conflicting representations in an attempt to assign meaning to and offer a perspective on how globalization is being realized in the postcolony. In order to accomplish this, however, such narratives offer an armchair tour of slums to a mostly Anglophone audience. Whether slums are typed as regressive or resilient, these fictions “reinsert” slums, as Nuttall and Mbembe note in another context, as the most easily “recognizable frame” for referencing differences in the global

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south. In other words, stereotypes of slums that circulate in global narratives about South Asia elevate slums themselves as a defining frame or lens through which the millennial megacity should be seen. As urban studies scholar Ananya Roy observes, “In the urban imagination of the new millennium, the ‘megacity’ has become shorthand for the human condition of the global South.” According to Mike Davis, megacities, also variously termed “hypercities” or “megalopolises,” are paradigmatic “postmodern slums” characterized by unparalleled “scale and velocity of Third World urbanization,” crushing population growths, and “gigantic concentrations of poverty.” Even fictional slum stereotypes, such as the ones in Slumdog and The White Tiger, extend the perception that such slums are a dominant metonym for the entire terrain of a postcolony. My concern here is not to contest or confirm the existence of slums qua slums but to explore the ethical binds that arise when they become one of the most salient imaginative stereotypes through which to view the third world. The assumption that each of these texts makes is that we enter slums from above in a transient fashion, observing and even molding its condition of existence from external locations. In so doing, these stereotypes invite a kind of voyeurism that is vertically structured and often poised to articulate the perceived differences in slums in a language and experience of consumption common to the rhetoric of globalization. Indeed, the controversies that Boyle’s film and Adiga’s novel generated pinpoint this tendency in both works to capitalize on what one reviewer terms an “aesthetics of misery” made explicitly for global consumption. Reviewing the novel for the Guardian, Kevin Rushby advances the following suspicion about Adiga’s India: “The home country is invariably presented as a place of brutal injustice and sordid corruption, one in which the poor are always dispossessed and victimized by their age-old enemies, the rich. . . . My hunch is this is fundamentally an outsider’s view and a superficial one. There are so many alternative Indias, uncontacted and unheard.” The much more furious protests against Slumdog also derive from the sense that the film provides an alien perspective on poverty. One, moreover, that should be condemned because it visualizes slum poverty for the purposes of pleasuring the foreign spectator. In her caustic review, Alice Miles coined the phrase “poverty porn,” which has become routine in referencing the film. Miles makes the point that as

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“Slumdog revels in the violence, degradation and horror,  .  .  . it invites you, the Westerner to enjoy it, too.” Film critic Shyamal Sengupta makes a similarly acerbic point: “It’s a white man’s imagined India. . . . It’s not quite snake charmers, but it’s close. It’s a poverty tour.” While appraisals like these are undoubtedly troubled by the impasse between subalternity and representation that Gayatri Spivak has illuminated, they also call attention to stereotypes as a tool for global surveillance. Stereotypes of slums in global texts could be thought of as part of the panopticon model that Foucault identifies with the security and disciplinary regimes of modernity. These stereotypes manage and, in so doing, keep tabs on the unruly damages of globalization for those who best benefit from it. But this is too easy a reading of the kind of porous surveillance these stereotypes reflect. To the extent that slum stereotypes are voyeuristic devices oriented toward the West, it is worth remembering Foucault’s contention that the “voyeur’s gaze” is an “inspecting gaze” that folds back on itself. That is, that which the stereotypes make visible is also internalized as a form of self-surveillance. A cyclical, selfreferential conception of voyeurism thus complicates the notion that stereotypes of slums coalesce power only along already well-established lines of difference. Mary Louise Pratt has written persuasively of the power of the “imperial gaze” in defining reality and wrestling against subaltern understandings of it in early colonial conquest narratives. She invokes the genre of travel writing to offer a theory of the “contact zone,” which emphasizes “the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters.” As part of our current virtual technology of seeing, stereotypes in global fictions may be thought of as the new frontier of the contact zone. The perceptual terrain of slum tourism—involving how stereotypes show and purpose slums as well as how they are received—depend on transcultural plays with knotty ethical commitments. Stereotypes of slums in other worlds, expressed through novels or films, comingle anthropological impulses with imaginative ones in order to direct affective responses. James Clifford reminds us that the distinction between classic ethnography and its modern reinvention is rooted in the difference between “field” work and cross-cultural “travel.” The former, Clifford claims invokes a notion of “localized dwelling” in which a whole culture is situated “around a particular locus” such as the village or, in

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this case, the slums. The latter, however, privileges “dwelling in travel” as a form of cultural encounter that takes displacement and translation as its entry point into other cultures. Clifford’s observations are relevant here because stereotypes strike ethnographic poses that simultaneously define the field and enact translations of it across wide social and geopolitical borders. For example, a film such as Slumdog at once designates India itself as coextensive with slums while opening up this “field” to numerous points of translation across class, nations, languages, and the like. However, because these are in the first place fictional portraits even as the portraits function as tours of distant and displaced realities, they invite interpretations of this reality. Stereotypes, as I’ve explained in the introduction, are part real and part phantasmic. Returning to the point about the role Anglophone fictions play in provoking questions about the nature of globalization, we might ask how slum metaphors are drawn to mobilize such concerns. The answer seems to lie in the way that slum representations depend on contrast—to highlight what slums are not—as well as transience. The first inaugurates a taxonomy of difference between poverty and affluence, lack and excess, as the terrain of global development. The second shifts the focus to acute considerations of what mobility itself means under these conditions. Of course, this last attaches not only to the deeper concerns about mobility out of slum life but also to the transient, touristic view we have of them as fictional stereotypes. The White Tiger is replete with descriptions that ratchet up the notion that India is a divided nation. Balram’s perspective seems inextricably linked to this deep divide that he perceives everywhere. “India is two countries in one,” Balram insists, “an India of Light and an India of Darkness.” If, as the reviewer for the Statesman (India) notes, the novel provides “a smooth read offering a canned shortcut to modern India seen from the dark side,” our understanding of the despair that Balram feels depends on his ability to sharply draw the differences he sees in India’s modernization. An overabundance of light and dark metaphors in fact produce the “canned” stereotype that Balram holds fast to in relaying the reality he encounters on the ground. Here is how Adiga marks Balram’s experience of a bifurcated Delhi: “Delhi is the capital of not one but two countries—two Indias. The Light and the Darkness both flow into Delhi. Gurgaon,  .  .  . the bright, modern end of the city, and this place, Old Delhi, is the other end. Full of the things the modern

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world forgot all about.” Indeed, this is just one of innumerable examples throughout the novel whose very repetitiousness—recirculating the same metaphors of light and darkness—fits in with Balram’s stereotypic method. The problem of India’s globalization, at least as far as Balram is able to make it out, is recognizing the seismic rifts in its very topography. Of course, Balram’s tour of India is plainly ironic, unraveling the popular acceptance of “India Shining,” that ubiquitous mantra valorizing India’s aggressive pursuit of globalization. His obsession with shopping malls and multinationals as defining features of “modernest” Delhi, becomes an expression of frustration only when it is understood in contrast to the unrelenting descriptions of places of “darkness.” Unable and unwilling to forget the underbelly of modernity, Balram insistently describes its details: “Thousands of people live on the sides of the road in Delhi. They have come from the Darkness too—you can tell by their thin bodies, filthy faces, by the animal-like way they live under the huge bridges and overpasses, making fires and washing and taking lice out of their hair while the cars roar past them.” In such descriptions strewn throughout the novel, slums emerge as a sublime stereotype. Always in high definition against the city’s most glossy façade’s of development, slum representations condense multiple stereotypes of underdevelopment—emaciation, filth, primitive pastimes, and even animality. Yet the usual association of these kinds of stereotypes with an anterior temporality that colonialism or globalization supposedly surpass is unmasked. The proliferation of stereotypes about slums in The White Tiger resolutely sutures deprivation to development. After all “the slum,” as Ashis Nandy remarks, “is often the first visible marker of modernization in Third World society.” Slums, replete with jungle stereotypes, serve as the immediate calculus for how the advances of late modernization are measured. The scrabbling, grubbing life of slums exposed by Balram’s travels around Delhi call attention to the profound cracks in India’s fervent embrace of the developmental promises of globalization. Slum stereotypes articulate sublime differences as the basis of globalization. Hence, the dynamic distance between the kind of security, safety, and abundance attached to luxurious parts of the city, on the one hand, and the fear and awe inspired by the slums, on the other hand, is invoked in tandem. This point about the affective dimension of slum stereotypes is one I elaborate on in the next section. For the moment,

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it is important to note that Balram seems always precariously perched on the periphery of both. As a driver, he notices that “the main road is full of shopping malls” while admitting that “we were outside the mall. We—a dozen or so chauffeurs—were waiting for our masters to finish their shopping. We weren’t allowed inside the mall.” His perspective on the divided landscape of the city comes from his ambulant vocation. He is required to constantly be on the move, and as he moves so do we traverse the most “glorious” and ignoble dimensions of development in India. At one instance Balram, the driver-turned-tour guide, showcases the smart side of Delhi: “Delhi . . . the capital of our glorious nation. The seat of Parliament, of the president, of all ministers, and prime ministers. The pride of our civic planning. The showcase of the republic.” The next, he reflects on the concrete jungle his boss and his wife live in, “The name of the apartment building was Buckingham Towers B Block. It was next to another huge apartment building.  .  .  . Next to that was Windsor Manor A Block. And there were apartment blocks like this, all shiny and new, and with nice big English names, as far as the eye could see.” And in the next, he describes the pavement squatters he sees out the window of his car when stuck in one of the city’s notorious traffic jams: “Dim streetlights were glowing down on the pavement on either side of the traffic; and in that orange-hued half-light, I could see multitudes of small, thin, grimy people squatting, waiting for a bus . . . or with nowhere to go and about to unfurl a mattress to sleep right there. . . . Hundreds there seemed to be on either side of the traffic.” In these portraits given in transit, the stereotype of the multitude morphs into the stereotype of slums. There are several immediate points that surface in the way that The White Tiger conveys the dislocations of slums as passing glimpses of Balram’s continual journeys around the city. Balram mediates the reader’s access to these dim zones where multitudes improvise a life. In this respect, Balram represents a fictional figure of the “native” informant whose insider’s point of view authenticates the specters of possession and dispossession his narrative juxtaposes. In other words, his presence functions by way of a curious paradox in which he is at once a native agent and a fictional narrator. As native, he is located and perhaps even locked within the scenes he describes. Akin to an anthropological agent, he effects the kind of “metonymic freezing” that Appadurai calls common

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to anthropology, where the partial authority of the native is used to draw larger conclusions about a culture, place, or people as a whole. Balram’s double vision of India as split between over- and underdevelopment fixes the story of South Asia that this novel tells. Balram, however, also figures as the novel’s mimetic locus for Anglophone readers. The main ruse of his story is that the novel itself is a series of his letters directed to the Chinese premier that is intercepted by readers. Moreover, because of Balram’s conviction that “some things . . . can only be said in English,” his confessions exist in dialogic relation to an Anglophone reader’s illicit reading of his letters. That the India he depicts can only be approached by way of his incessant movements (from village to city, from upscale locations to slums, from its political hub in the North to the technology corridor of the South) forces a mimetic comparison between the terms of his mobility and that of the readers, between the stereotypes he peddles and the ones that already have a global appeal. Balram’s hectic and often-compromised tour of India’s “hermaphrodictic landscape,” in other words, raises questions about its global reception. His anxiety about his place as a not-quite subaltern on the outskirts of both worlds that he surveys in passing implicates the reader as tourist. If his touristic fear of slums fuels Balram’s desire for greater social mobility for himself, the reader as tourist enters into a similar extended allegory vis-à-vis the stereotypes of South Asia that he perfunctorily confronts in the novel. At stake are the very questions of voyeurism, motivation, access, identity, and agency that guide Balram’s stereotypes as much as his desires. But these are now restlessly mirrored in the ethical dilemmas that the novel maps for its reader: how do we as readers see Balram and thereby understand our leisurely consumption of his text? Violence, the novel suggests in a Fanonian vein, is key to Balram’s release from the wretched circumstance of his servitude. He murders his boss viciously and steals his money to set up his own fledgling enterprise. His generalizations on this point—“Of course, a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses”—imply that his desires are not uncommon in the postcolony. Faced with Balram’s embrace of violence, new ethical questions about his vision present themselves. If we join our vision to his, accept his tour as ours, we must also accept his indictment of globalization’s Janus face, which means reading his

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brutality as a sign of subversion, as does one critic: “Balram[’s] . . . reasons for murder become completely understandable by the end.” But this, too, presents a complication because Balram’s freedom does not free him in any complete sense. His leap out of bondage, such as it is, does little to disturb the manacles of the divided world to which he gives witness. Finding identity or alienation through his point of view in a sense proves futile. The White Tiger suggests that at their hearts both are equivalent insofar as no change is effected in his and our views of the world seen through stereotypes. Yet there is a further point that is made. Both his stereotypical vision and his violence echo the stasis of the reader’s own transient entry into the text, one that abruptly ends when the text does. It is the inertia in such acts of reading or seeing, in which stereotypes conjure worlds that are consumed with violence and then abandoned, that the novel asks that we scrutinize. Slumdog, like The White Tiger, also employs certain mimetic devices that accentuate the role of the audience as voyeur into a rifted world that can only be perceived through spectacular stereotypes. Narrative and cinematic devices, such as the game show itself or the opening sequence of panning aerial shots that telescopically bring slums near, lend perspicacity to the viewer’s gaze while framing the touristic agenda of the film itself. Indeed, the film calls attention to the contradiction that slums pose to the developmentalism that viewers may identify with a rapidly urbanizing global south. Reunited with the brother who was forced to abandon him, Jamal perches with Salim on the edge of a partly built high-rise overlooking Mumbai. The camera pans wide on the densely packed, low-lying slumscape below, broken incongruously by a few other gleaming skyscrapers. Salim, who is more like Rushdie’s dark antihero Shiva, boasts to the more morally righteous Jamal, “That used to be our slum. Can you believe that, huh? We used to live right there, man. Now it’s all business. India is at the center of the world now, bhai. And I, I am at the center of the center.” This moment perfectly captures the contradiction inherent in the slum stereotype. To viewers, the slumscape serves as a sign of imminent development to be breathlessly anticipated, as Salim does, even as its very presence marks the failure of globalization’s promise. Sentimentally, this failure is marked as a loss in the film; seeing the slums razed heralds a kind of modernization that cannot contain the boys’ past, their filial love, or rationalize

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their role within globalized developmentalism as anything other than criminal. Salim’s business, at the center of the business of converting slums into the luxuriousness of a new India, is to become part of a mercenary and violent urban mafia. Salim, we might say, is a slumdog like Balram. However, unlike Adiga’s novel, the film ultimately displaces concerns over the stereotypes that it projects of ghetto life and the luster of game playing into an overly romanticized resolution. As Nandini Chandra observes, in Slumdog “the poor cannot be seen through what is perceived as instrumental categories of labor or class anymore. They instead become denizens of a shadowy, illicit realm which can be made comprehensible only by integrating it within certain humanist tropes like love and freedom.” This kind of magical reconciliation where the dysfunctions brought on by globalization are mapped onto romance rather than resistance, as is the case with Balram, leads to a dead-end in terms of a critique of globalization. Whereas in the novel, Balram’s violence exposes the alchemy behind the success stories of globalization and reflects back on the parasitic quality of global tourism, the film stops short of allowing for such leaps. Instead, stereotypes of slums in Slumdog dissolve into a generic romance that, to use Laura Mulvey’s terms of analysis for cinematic voyeurism, maintain the viewer in a “scopophilic” relation to the postcolony. Slumdog visualizes the postcolony in terms of its “to-be-looked-at-ness” such that its stereotypical projections—of India’s swaths of slums or fast gimmicks toward affluence—are readable only as breathtaking romance. Although Mulvey writes mainly about the gender dynamics of cinematic looking, her psychoanalytic discussion of the “voyeuristic-scopophillic” gaze of mainstream films may be richly extended to understand how filmic stereotypes about the postcolony are perceived in the global imaginary. She notes that the magical style of cinema “satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking” that is deeply narcissistic. While for Mulvey such a self-centered fetishistic looking positions cinema consumption along masculinist/feminist lines, stereotypes about the postcolony such as those in Slumdog realign the power differentials of desire associated with cinematic pleasure along new vectors of cultural difference. As Giridharadas explains in his review, the film’s American popularity and “the movie’s strange hold over Americans” is that “it channels to them their own Gatsbyesque fantasy of self-invention, and yet places it far

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enough away as to imply that it is now really someone else’s fantasy.” The suspenseful yet in the end happy outcome of the romance between Jamal and Latika serves as catalyst for how the specter of slums shifts, romancing passive viewing into pleasure and poverty into an improbably monetized future for the postcolony. More recently there has been a curious trend toward reality slum tours, where the kind of passive viewing in films such as Slumdog inspire a more active participation by tourists wanting to see slums for themselves. As Julia Meschkank notes, the worldwide success of the film “trebled” the interest in reality tours of Bombay slums. One example of this global phenomenon is Reality Tours and Travel, an organization that conducts tours of Dharavi, the largest slum in Bombay, which is also featured prominently in Slumdog Millionaire. These “touristic transits” play on the many significations of slum stereotypes in the global imaginary. They manage the translation of fantasies about slum life that proliferate in popular representations into “authentic” or real experience. In addition, they regulate an ethical and affective economy where concerns over the capitalization of poverty collude with the ethos of altruism, and where the criminalization of slum poverty is contested by claims to creative enterprise. Chris Way, a recent transplant from the United Kingdom, and his local business partner, Krishna Pujari, who started Reality Tours claim, for instance, that tour profits go toward the education of slum kids and adult computer courses. Reality Tours also promise a glimpse into the many “innovative” small crafts–based industries of Dharavi from recycling, to pottery-making, to “poppadam-making,” and the like. “When passing through the residential spaces,” the tour website promises prospective clients, “you will undoubtedly feel the sense of community and spirit that exists in the area.” Way and Pujari argue that the tours are meant to dispel negative stereotypes about slum communities and show instead the “purpose and determination” of its inhabitants. Yet the itinerary of these tours—providing close-up looks at the salacious (the red-light area), the real (resident huts, laundry embankments), and the extraordinary (sweeping roof-top views, home factory tours)—provoke many more questions than they allay about the circulation of fear, desire, culpability, and promise that are engendered when slums are imagined as the postcolony’s final global frontier.

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THE HORROR, THE HORROR! FEAR, ABJECTION, AND THE AFFECTIVE LIFE OF SLUMS

Along with poverty, the association of slums with squalor, disease, dirt, vice, crowding, and ramshackle housing has been virtually intact since the nineteenth century. Slum stereotypes that surface in fictions about the global south reanimate these age-old understandings of the conditions of slum life as a routine part of life in the postcolony. But they also go further in compounding a series of subjective attachments that designate the slum not only as a place of lack but also of fear. The idea that abounds is that slums are the crucible for primitive living, rampant with the disorder, dirt, crime, and contagion that remain counter to but still at the heart of civilization. The dominant affect is one of fear and various others of disgust, paranoia, offense, and caution that this fear animates. To the extent that this stereotype dominates representations of South Asia, it also alerts us to how the affective map of fear provoked by slums is yoked to abjection. The phobic symbolicity of the slum given through stereotypes, in other words, renders the space of the global south itself as abject. The enigmatic connection between phobia and abjection is, as Julia Kristeva argues in The Powers of Horror, one that is predicated on “want” and “violence,” the two long arms of globalization. Stereotypes of slums certainly pivot along these lines. Phobia, Kristeva argues, is a “metaphor of want as such” and is therefore an expression of the subject’s deferred desires insofar as fears are expressive of the “frailty” of desire thwarted by abjection. Freud’s analysis of the case of Little Hans, who expresses a fear of horses, forms the crux of Kristeva’s theory linking fear to abjection. Hans’s statement, “I am afraid of horses, I am afraid of being bitten,” is the overdetermined psychoanalytic scene of confession, ventriloquism, and libidinal drive that Kristeva reads to elaborate the ties between “disappointed desires,” “violence,” and its abject symbolic field. In the context of the fear located in slum stereotypes, it is important to consider how this affects my suggestion that the slum’s manifold abject connotations emanate from fear. Fear, as Kristeva reminds us, serves as a cipher that “become[s] a hieroglyph” for linguistic ruses, violent substitutions, psychic proclivities (hallucinations, psychoses), and the articulation of structures of power between the egotistical self and its other. Whatever

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is abject—such as slums—evokes fear precisely because it shares these hieroglyphic prospects that guide the phobic affect and its many declensions. Ultimately, abjection is also important, as Kristeva notes, because it “is eminently productive of culture,” because it indicates exactly “what disturbs identity, system, order.” As sites of abjection, then, slums appear to fearfully mark the line between the cultured and uncultured, between what is perhaps simultaneously desired and violently disavowed. If fear is one constant that attaches to slum stereotypes in maintaining the gap between culture and its other, dirt and disorder are certainly another. Kristeva is insistent that filth and uncleanliness are not the causal signatures of abjection; she sees the latter more narrowly as a sign of fear that social orders may be unstable. Even if this is the case, it is significant that dirt, squalor, pollution, grime, and other such unclean metaphors are compulsively deployed to render that which is abject. Stereotypes of slums in global novels invariably coalesce around such tropes whose very aggregation leads to the kinds of anxieties about social disorder, aggression, and uncultured others that are generally signaled by abjection. In short, slum stereotypes make unnameable and inchoate fears about global difference coherent by anchoring them to particular abject metaphors. Mary Douglas has given the most astute account of how dirt moves us toward drawing subjective boundaries that are civilizationally defined. “As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder,” Douglas argues. “There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder.  .  .  . Dirt offends against order.” Perspective—how dirt is shown and seen—is critical to its role in signifying civilizational waste. For Douglas “dirt avoidance” is a generative, “creative movement” that is highly functional (it “organize[s] the environment”) and perspectivally relative, as it is also coercive of certain governing social codes. “The whole universe,” Douglas notes, “is harnessed by men’s attempts to force one another to good citizenship. Thus we find that certain moral values are upheld and certain social rules defined by beliefs in dangerous contagion.” Representations of slums dependent on touristic perspectives congeal the divides between order and disorder, comfort and contagion, security and danger, and complacence and fear necessary to produce the “good citizens” of globalization. How stable these divides are is intrinsic to how these stereotypes are read, a point to which I will return later.

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The scatological framing of slums in Slumdog reveals the point I’m making about the coincidence between negative slum stereotypes and the lure of a globalized future. One of the most striking opening scenes of the film, the very first flashback to Jamal’s life as a slum urchin, is one that is literally shit drenched. The camera’s fast motion follows Jamal’s mad scramble to see the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan. The audible buzz of Amitabh’s arrival in the neighborhood reaches Jamal just as he is locked in a communal outhouse. Desperate to see this mythic figure, Jamal escapes by jumping through the outhouse’s waste-hole into a sea of excreta. The clamoring crowds packed around Amitabh, who has moments before touched down on the ground in a helicopter, part for Jamal as if automatically in revulsion of his filth. The culminating scene, one of extraordinary forced perspective, is remarkable for its contrast: the slum boy, covered head to toe in fecal matter, confronts the looming, pristine figure of the star (figure 3.1). Both remain visibly invisible to viewers. Jamal, because he is reduced to nothing more than the filth covering him, cannot be seen. Amitabh, by virtue of his immense celebrity, is cut out of the frame altogether. There is a double perspective at work in this scene; each figure is partially visible as archetype—of dirt, of celebrity—but nothing else. Slumdog implies that they remain similarly elusive to each other as well. “Excrement,” as Kristeva notes, is after all a form of defilement that parses identity absolutely, threatening sacred subjects “from without.” The rest of the film that follows one could say is about the wild pursuit of an evasive, illusory celebrity by the one most steeped in dirt and identified most with abjection. The film’s progression presses on the fear that Jamal’s quest for a better life may yet fail and that he would be returned to the disarrayed, dirty, and even violently dangerous place of slums from which he is making his escape. The fact that Amitabh cannot be glimpsed directly in this scene implies that the glitz of movie-stardom too remains outside the frame of the film, and so beyond Jamal’s immediate orbit. I will elaborate the way in which the film augments its stress on fear in a moment. Slumdog of course, it is important to note, is the story of the successful transformation of abjection into global recognition. The film converts the abject horror of the slumdog’s appearance into the ethereal fantasy of celebrity. Jamal plays a good game; all over the country the film shows crowds gathered as extensions of the viewers themselves, rooting for him. And he comes out the winner of a million rupees!

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Figure . Film still from Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle).

The idea that slums represent the defilement present in modern life is also a constant in The White Tiger. A driver who works for a rich family, Balram doesn’t live in a slum. Nevertheless, the novel recounts his continual obsession with slums; he deliberately crosses over to the other side to take measure of the panoply of degradations to be found there. The novel details one such occasion of his approach of slums located adjacent to a mall: “I had to stop because five feet ahead of me a row of men had squatted on the ground in a nearly perfect straight line. They were defecating. I was at a slum.” At once, the slum appears as a boundary between the pure and the impure, and, as in Slumdog, its abjection is made absolute by shit. The image of grown men “defecating” in the open spirals into a sensory experience of the slum’s abjection that for Balram raises profoundly uncertain questions about the humanity he sees there: All these construction workers who were building the malls and giant apartment buildings lived there. . . . The men were defecating in the open like a defensive wall in front of the slum: making a line that no respectable human should cross. The wind wafted the stench of shit toward me. . . . I picked my way around the broken glass, wire, and shattered tube lights. The stench of feces was replaced by the stronger stench of industrial sewage. The slum ended in an open sewer. . . . Two children were splashing about in the black water.

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This moment in the novel marks Balram’s journey into the depths of a slum, a place he sees as outside the bounds of human “respectability.” Balram, however, willfully steps over the threshold of civility into this other world to wallow in its difference. A difference defined for him, as for readers who accompany him, by a visceral assault of noxious smells and sights. Civilization itself is laid to waste, we’re led to believe, by the “broken” and “shattered” specters of garbage and debris he finds there, including the discarded children contaminated by “industrial sewage.” Slums are, it is asserted, the toxic by product of modernity. What is surprising about this moment is Balram’s persistence in becoming a part of this landscape. Rather than turn away at once, repulsed by the slum as a place of radical failure, he instead chooses to momentarily join in. “I squatted down with them and grinned,” Balram confesses. “A few immediately turned their eyes away. They were still human beings.” Quite obviously the novel posits the slum as point of identity as well as alienation; by sharing in their ritual defilement, Balram becomes subject, however perfunctorily, to their symbolic world. Balram perceives the distinct humanity of its inhabitants as an aspect of commonality before being overcome by this possibility. The tension that surfaces is uniquely reflected by the psychically jolting laughter Balram shares with the other squatters, one that is compulsively raucous, rude, and furious. Balram describes the scene: “I saw one fellow, a thin black fellow.  .  .  . He began to laugh—and I began to laugh—and then all the crappers laughed together. . . . He began laughing—laughing so violently that he fell down face-first in the ground still laughing, exposing his stained arse to the stained sky of Delhi. . . . I walked back . . . and wiped my hands clean of the slum.” Despite an affirmation of a common humanity, this experience of the slum is presented as a turning point in the novel. The slum retreats into a space of alterity whose immediate proximity—whether to Balram, the city of Delhi, or the larger project of a speedy modernization that the novel suggests is under way in India—can only be interpreted affectively in terms of a desperate coming together in mockery. Balram determinedly eschews his inclusion in what he perceives as an ineffectual ploy for recognition. “Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence,” he declares, thus refocusing attention on the most disturbing aspect of slum reality: the devolution of human life into animality.

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Balram’s desire to propel himself away from slums and into a plush life rides on his fear that slums are the converse of human civilization. Time and again the novel dwells on his conviction that slums imperil easy assumptions about human civilizational progress. On yet another cruise through the city, he observes: “Delhi is a city where civilization can appear and disappear within five minutes. On either side of us right now there was just wilderness and rubbish.” Of course, in The White Tiger this “wilderness” is inhabited by people. But it is metaphorically envisioned as a form of living that is wild and bestial precisely because it is so ruthlessly repressed. Adiga introduces the image of the “rooster coop” to convey the caged violence of slum life: The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop. Go to Old Delhi . . . and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly in wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench—the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. . . . The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.

The image of the rooster coop has obvious parallels with Balram’s foray into the slums. Both are replete with sordid descriptions of filth and containment that defy ideas of human advancement. The rooster coop, like the slum, emerges as the predominant image of a violent struggle simply to exist within the impossible confines of a nation that pursues its modernity through outright oppression of a majority of its citizens—the “99.9 percent” who Balram insists are trapped in rooster coops. Balram’s mercurial fury that is matched to his explosive embrace of violence emerges from his growing sense of slums as a place of entrapment. No doubt The White Tiger’s use of slums to manage the affective economy of the text blatantly indicts the staggering economic gaps that are forcibly maintained to secure India’s modernization. However, the finer point that the novel makes through this merging of slum stereotypes with its protagonist’s feelings of outrage, fear, and the desire for something more is that slums provoke strong affective reactions. This it seems is especially true of those such as Balram who are part of the “numerous

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lower-middle class” that Ashis Nandy identifies as most proximal to them. This class, Nandy observes, is “exposed to modern media, panIndian politics and the global market. It is the class that has closest links with the slum and lives with the fear of slipping into a slum or never getting out of it.” It is this fear that both The White Tiger and Slumdog depict and eclipse through stereotyping slums. Displaced alternatively onto violence, chance, romance, and enterprise, stereotypes of slums as the most derelict spaces of modernity also serve as the most intense points of identification between the actors in these fictions and their audience. Directly paralleling the image of the rooster coop is the beggar’s camp in Slumdog. The three orphan children, recently evicted by riots from the slum that was their home, are abducted to a camp for beggar children. This scene proceeds by opening a gap between the children’s experience of the slum and the audiences’ view of it that accentuates the affective tensions of this moment. Hoarded together with others like them, they celebrate their good luck at having survived because of the benevolence of their abductors who train them to sing devotional songs and provide free meals. The audience, however, is made privy to the criminal intentions of the thugs who mean to disfigure and exploit the children as beggars. The threat of violence pervades this moment in which pathos and fear rise in proportion to Jamal’s exultation as he is ironically asked to perform “darshan do bhagwan” (“give me sight lord”) seconds before he is to be forcibly blinded with acid. Not seeing the dangers that await, Jamal shouts out his elation at being chosen to perform. His words in Hindi, “It’s our turn finally” are subtitled more jubilantly in English as “The good life here we come!” At the last minute Jamal is saved from a terrible fate by his brother Salim. All three children escape the camp but in so doing establish the salience of how slums are cast in the film. To viewers, at least English-speaking ones, slums, generative of fear and imminent bodily violation, become impossibly opposed to any sense of “good life.” The film suggests that, for Jamal, the good life can be had only by effectively escaping such locations. Indeed, Jamal’s successful escape has been read by some critics in utopian terms as reflective of the “informal” circuits of “urban navigation” to which the film remains committed, thereby “asserting the importance of an alternative realm of knowledge outside of the formal domains of the state” and therefore of

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globalization itself. Moreover, the slums—typed through camps and coops—figure as zero-sum locations of the capitalist exploitation of poverty. The conundrum, of course, is that in both narratives, escaping such exploitation is premised on greater, rather than lesser, engagement with the promise of good life global capital makes. As the predominant affect associated with slums, fear is generated by a reliance on other affects, such as disgust, despair, and horror, as well as effects such as filth, violence, and the loss of a secure humanity. Fear’s capacity to mobilize both the diegetic movement intrinsic to slum narratives and the extradiegetic responses resides in its centrality within the contemporary global imaginary. Fear crucially defines how civilizational ideas about culture and its lack proceed on the basis of abject identification. The slum is one such location of the abject; stereotypes of death, which I deal with in the next chapter, are another. One may argue, as Zygmunt Bauman does, that fear is the affect that most singularly conditions our present moment of global modernity. Today, as Bauman notes, fear bespeaks itself in “diffuse,” “scattered,” and “unclear,” terms as a widespread existential apprehension of what he terms the “liquid modernity” of globalization. As a constant presence, fear takes on a “derivative” form of being “ever susceptible to danger” and “acquires a self-propelling capacity.” Slum stereotypes of the global south are signal conveyances of this type of fear that hovers and crosses all kinds of borders, whether imaginative or real. Bauman identifies perceived threats to body and possessions, social order, and secure livelihoods as the source of derivative fears. Slums concretize these threats in ways that are easily locatable. Still, the ability to attend to this kind of fear in the easily discerned form of a stereotype ultimately offers a ruse. As a stereotype, slums seem to expose our fears in terms that are fixed, yet the stories they tell neatly deflect and redirect the causal threats they illuminate—of poverty, social inequity, and exploitation—onto other horizons. One such startling deflection is the manner in which slums are envisioned as containing repositories of what Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto terms “dead capital.” He advocates seizing the resources accumulated in these poor and in most cases extralegal or informal sectors for their enormous potential to generate further capital. “In every country we have examined, the entrepreneurial ingenuity of the poor has created wealth on a vast scale,” de Soto writes, “wealth that also constitutes

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the largest source of potential capital for development.” What is so curious about de Soto’s unabashed conviction that the poor are actually at least cumulatively rich is that it works by deflating fears about the ravages of poverty and violence onto other stereotypes. His argument seeks to reclaim how slums are seen, for instance, by charitable organizations that, according to him, focus too exclusively on their conditions of dispossession and depravity. Rather, he argues that slum life needs to be understood for its “heroic” entrepreneurial elements and mined through legal and juridical intervention such as through taxation, increased contractual regulation of its informal markets, and surveillance over the management of its properties so that the fortune accumulated in slums may be more efficiently extracted. We might note, as does J. M. Tyree, that Slumdog also “sells a certain dated type of globalism in which the boom times are infinite,” and in so doing translates economies of hardship into visions of plenitude. The optimism with which de Soto views slums has been critiqued by Ananya Roy, Mike Davis, and others for its uncritical championing of liberal globalization as the way forward. As Roy notes, de Soto’s brand of “poverty capital,” which she defines as the conversion of poverty into capital, is intent on extracting value from slums by strategically thinking of ways through which “poor populations can be rendered visible for global capitalism. Yet the most remarkable aspect of his stance is its simultaneous displacement of stereotypes of slums entrenched in fear onto romantic notions of heroism and creativity—what I’ve previously called slum magic—that resonate with fantasies of and about globalization. Slumdog, The White Tiger, and other similar slum stories also proliferate such fantasies. SLUM MAGIC

One of Balram Halwai’s most provocative claims about himself is that he is an entrepreneur like no other. “I absorbed everything,” he admits, “(politics—coal—China—Stork family)—that’s the amazing thing about entrepreneurs. We are like sponges—we absorb and grow.” This idea of exceptional individual aspiration is at the heart of how The White Tiger frames the struggles of its protagonist. The singular cause of Balram’s transformation from servant to self-made businessman, we’re given to understand, is his capacity at self-invention. Additionally, the novel

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contends that this kind of entrepreneurial ambition holds nearly all of the subaltern and proximal classes across the nation in its thrall; “our nation,” Balram insists, “ . . . does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them.” I began by suggesting that fictions about slums promote a kind of “slum magic” as one of the stereotypical cornerstones for how slum life should be understood. The idea of “entrepreneurship” as a form of magicality is important for several reasons: it represents scheming as endemic to slum life; it naturalizes such schemes or informal hustles as part of the language of global development; yet as a fictional invocation, it retains the possibility of an ironic subversion of developmental fantasies. In this last section, I take stock of the different kinds of magicality that compose the slum stereotypically as dysphoric as well as euphoric. As many reviewers have noted, the popularity of Slumdog stems in large part from its success at matching its tempo to that of a street hustle or “dhandha.” Slumdog plays on various entrepreneurial schemes that attempt to reinvent misery, urban space, technology, crime, and fantasies (of celebrity, wealth, romance, etc.). Jamal’s journey from the slums of Mumbai where communal riots erupt in 1992–1993 to the hot seat of the game show is to be understood as a culmination of improbable hustles. Surprisingly, even a virtuoso of magical fiction such as Salman Rushdie has criticized the film for “piling impossibility on impossibility.” The irony is that his critique rests on the fact that Slumdog, like almost all of Rushdie’s novels, turns on an almost manic juxtaposition of the real and fantastic to convey slum life. The life of a slumdog is defined by his miraculously close encounter with and escape from numerous scenes that typify modernizing India: the violence of riots, the desperation of beggar camps, the wheeling and dealing of the underworld that gives the city a facelift in the form of skyscrapers and multiplexes, the hierarchical operations of call centers, and police brutality. Slumdogs, the film implies, navigate all of these risks through a unique display of cunning and fortuitous plays of chance. The life of slum dwellers in this way acquires a shine, a mesmeric sense of possibility simply because they manage to evade the dangers that dot their way. In the opening scenes, the film poses a question to its viewers about Jamal’s success—“How did he win?”—and proposes three plausible answers: “He cheated. He was a genius. It was written.” The implication is that Jamal’s “heroism” is a result of any or all of these factors: illicit tendency, exceptional promise, and

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inexplicable magic. As a consequence, slums are stereotypically framed as apocalyptic sites of crises that become crucibles for a strange alchemy that shapes human destiny. The White Tiger also similarly attributes a mix of alchemy and daring to explain Balram’s transformation from “human spider” caught in the rooster coop to entrepreneur. Balram, the “thinking man and an Entrepreneur,” is aware that for him to escape the fate of slums, he has to typify a particular set of qualities that he describes in the following way: “My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.” Just as Jamal’s heroic escapes are typed through the kind of chance that makes romantic resolutions possible, Balram’s way out of slums depends on a more knowing kind of inventiveness. Balram begins his escape by consciously adopting the tactics of a mimic. His way forward, the novel implies, involves an intuitive, cunning mimesis of manners and practices that game the system so that he may align himself with affluence rather than slums. “Why had my father never taught me to brush my teeth in milky foam? Why had he raised me to live like an animal? Why do all poor live amid such filth and ugliness?” he moans before making concerted efforts to cultivate himself otherwise. He seeks out slick T-shirts, takes up daily hygiene, infiltrates and wanders malls from which he has previously been excluded, begins to correct his own accent, reads lofty books, and seeks out a blonde girl in a brothel. His actions, even when they fail, are carefully plotted to follow the outlines he perceives in the lives of his masters, Ashok and his fiancée, Pinky Madam. In this sense, the magic that Balram works and that The White Tiger exposes relative to slums is one that levels class emulation or mimicry as the only way out of the hypergritty settings of slums. Rather than romance, Balram’s story invokes slums in terms of a fierce realism that grips his life and that he has to somehow confound. However, in both film and novel, the protagonists are illuminated by a spotlight (Jamal literally sits under the glare of TV lights; Balram under the glow of a chandelier), a kind of enchanted space of enlightenment that uniquely shines on them to highlight their achievements as singular victories. As each story hurtles toward its suspenseful but secure resolutions, slums become rapidly receding outliers to the emergence of a story about a

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unique individual rise from which they are nevertheless indissociable. In short, slum life is projected as the catalyst to modernity’s dependence on liberal individuality and disavowed as that which is most radically alien to it. In order to convey the determined, self-motivated triumphalism of Balram’s switch from one side of the social divide to the next, however, the novel eviscerates certain social horizons within South Asia as incompatible with changes wrought by modernization. Balram’s growing entrepreneurial insight thus finds itself at odds with both the demands of his still feudal joint family (including prospects of his own marriage) and a belief in luck or education in and of themselves. So unlike Slumdog, which resurrects the single boy–girl romance as the ideal form of “love” that Jamal’s global success enables, Balram appears as the outlaw par excellence. “I have switched sides: I am now one of those who cannot be caught in India.” His crime is that he is responsible for viciously killing his boss, which in a cycle of retribution means the extinction of his extended family. Balram, however, is unfazed about being a “virtual mass murderer” because in his view, his family has to be expended. “The Indian Family,” he consoles himself, “is the reason we are tied to the coop.” The magic of Balram’s cunning, his creative criminality, is thus born of a hardhearted desire to dispense with customary social relations. In contrast to Slumdog’s glamorous narrative of rescue that has wide global appeal, Balram’s narrative represents an avowedly solitary ascent. Yet Balram’s brand of “feral capitalism” that seeks to match the larger political economy of dispossession and predatory ambition is haunted by an attachment he has to slums that he comes to fear even as it sustains him, in a way fortifying his resolve. The novel repeatedly lingers on such moments when Balram’s gaze on the slum reverts back on his selfconsciousness about his own location. Describing yet another instance of his driving by one such area, the novel pauses to emphasize Balram’s double vision: “We were two separate cities—inside and outside the dark egg. I knew I was in the right city. But my father, if he were alive, would be sitting on that pavement . . . and I couldn’t stop thinking of that and recognizing his features in some beggar out there. I was in some way out of the car too, even while I was driving it.” Such moments in the novel draw slums out as enduring, haunting fixtures intimately experienced by many who may appear to see it from

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a distance. Although Balram eventually condemns his family, the slum retains its psychological grip on him, repeatedly directing him to an uncanny reckoning with his past. The slum appears to him as abject—a place to be feared and disavowed—at the same time as it mirrors a constant dimension of his life. The slum is the only source of community that he and, by extension, we see even as there is the continual effort that Balram exerts in keeping himself immune from its real conditions. The slum is what limns how communities of affection are made readable in fictions about South Asia. It is also, however, what is placed outside the affective circles of globalization drawn by the kind of desire, acquisitiveness, and individual ambition Balram adopts. Balram frets that he is perceived as a “fugitive” in the malls he enters where he so desperately wants to belong. The pristine order of the malls that Balram covets, however, are no match to the kind of camaraderie he shares on the streets or his sense that there may be a version of humanity with which he, fortified as he is in the car, is losing contact. The only moments of levity Balram seems to experience are tied to moments when, despite his larger inclinations, he risks joining the crowds he otherwise fears and disdains. The novel details one such occasion when Balram rejoices with a group of derelicts after seeing off Ashok’s particularly sadistic brother: “When the train left, I danced around the platform and clapped my hands. Two homeless urchins were watching me, and they laughed—they clapped their hands too. One of them began singing a song from the latest Hindi film, and we danced together on the platform.” Scenes of unanticipated jouissance recur intermittently in the novel, suggesting that slum life contains values that are always in surplus of the kinds of motivational capitalist creed that drives Balram’s progress. These moments of community expressively defy the momentum of the narrative that resolves itself in the satisfaction or pleasure that Balram derives from capitalist gain or “entrepreneurship.” Fleeting glimpses of joy, fully immured in material want and pain, form the backdrop of the plastic allure that defines the story of global development that the novel also tells. The infinite glamour of affluence that fuels stereotypes about inventive escapes from slums is therefore complicated by the idea that slums continually supplement human relations that modernity obscures. The novel resurrects recognizable forms of human attachments—namely

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familial intimacy—as a foil for what Ashok, Balram, and others lose. These occasions draw attention to the inconsistency of stereotypes about slums; such figurations suggest that the most hallowed and abject confinements within postcolonies are not yet reconciled—at least not completely—to the promised goals of modernization. Through Balram we again catch a passing glimpse of slums equated momentarily with a surprising plenitude of affection: “We were driving past a slum,” Balram notes, “one of those series of makeshift tents. . . . I saw silhouettes of the slum dwellers close to one another inside the tents; you could make out one family—a husband, a wife, a child—all huddled around a stove inside one tent, lit up by a golden lamp. The intimacy seemed so complete—so crushingly complete.” What jumps out here is the “crushing” pathos of Balram’s observations as a register of his desires. He, like us, has no way of knowing that the “slum dwellers” shown are in fact a family or that their proximity brings them any comfort. The implication is that our gaze at slums is at best surreptitious and incomplete. In our effort to give meaning to them, they call forth our desires. Slum stereotypes are unstable because they provide only a transient view of their object, a view that can only gesture to our own fuller ideations behind mere “silhouettes” that can never decisively be confirmed. Nonetheless, the specter of the slum that appears so perfunctorily hints that there is a “golden” glow that stands as the antithesis of acquisitive desire and that is other than the fluorescence of wealth sought by Jamal and Balram. Slum stereotypes therefore present an ethical impasse. They champion slums as magical places whose informal economies produce wildly imaginative types of individual innovations. At the same time, slums also come to represent forms of human sociality that remain impenetrable to the surveilling gaze of modernity. I began by suggesting that fictional stereotypes of slums reveal the anthropological impulses of late modernity insofar as they are ciphers for how the global south is looked at. Further, I argued that slum stereotypes advance an idea of slums as magical places. It bears clarifying then, given what I have said, that this notion of slum magic suspends and animates forms of agency that are attributed to South Asia as it is globally imagined. Michael Taussig has written that “the magic of the state,” the illusion that it is a life force, pervades modern ideas of selfhood and being. The state, along with God, the nation, and

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the economy, are “abstract identities” credited with “Being,” he suggests. However, these sources of modern sovereignty are ultimately spectral. “Clearly they [the state, nation, and the like] are fetishes,” Taussig writes, “invented wholes of materialized artifice into whose woeful insufficiency of being we have placed soul stuff.” For Taussig, an anthropology of modernity itself follows from the way in which human life is studiously reflected by and erased by these highly prized yet hollow instruments of modern sovereignty. Taussig suggests that “the state’s magic of attraction and repulsion” is harnessed by the grip nations have over the modern self. If we were to read Adiga’s novel as a critique of the limited forms of sovereignty the postcolonial nation state allows, as he himself would ask that we do, it is clear that he points to the ways that the inventive potential associated with slum magic are routinely stalled by the machinery of state and nation. One explicit moment of such a critique is located in Balram’s encounter on the platform of a train station with the luck machines that foretell fortunes. Again, Balram conditions our perspective of these technological marvels that are, as he notes, ubiquitous all over India: Now, if you visit any train station in India, you will see, as you stand waiting for your train a row of bizarre-looking machines with red lightbulbs, kaleidoscope wheels, and whirling yellow circles. These are your fortune-and-weight-for-one-rupee machines that stand in every rail platform in the country. . . . Two kinds of people use these machines: the children of the rich, or the fully grown adults of the poorer class, who remain all their lives children.

The idea that slums are richly generative sites for a self-motivated development that heralds the unproblematic insertion of postcolonies into a global economy is brought to a halt with this description. As part of the larger tour of slums that this novel provides, the fortune machines are synecdoches for the failure of modernization. Further, they signify the illusory hold that nation-states maintain on the poor by deploying a fully syncretic modern apparatus that is technologically proficient. Slum magic at the hands of the postcolonial state in this moment is reduced to what Frazer in an earlier period identified as

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“sympathetic magic,” which deliberately confuses cause and effect, and superstitious art with scientific law. By pausing on the limits of modern advancement, slum stereotypes compel us to contemplate those aspects of slum life that cannot be fully typed. The novel directly contrasts Balram’s conviction that, with illicit gain and hard work, “you can make magic happen in this country” with the magic of literacy. He himself is transfixed by books, electrified by their presence on street corners. This self-proclaimed entrepreneur with a “half-baked” education confesses that “standing around books, even books in a foreign language,” he felt “a kind of electricity buzzing up toward [him].” Almost surprisingly, the novel’s association of slums with magic finds a new resonance in scenes of reading. We encounter Balram’s enchantment with poetry sold on the pavement by a used book vendor. “Tens of thousands of dirty, rotting, blackened books on every subject . . . heaped upon the pavement. . . . I went amid the books and sucked in the air: it was like oxygen after the stench of the brothel.” Following this, he briefly dwells on poetry, thinking it “a kind of secret, a magic known only to wise men.” And finally, even as he is ensconced in his upwardly mobile status as the owner of a start-up, he warns his audience: “Keep your ears open in Bangalore—in any city or town in India—and you will hear stirrings, rumors, threats of insurrection. Men sit under lampposts at night and read. Men huddle together and discuss and point fingers to the heavens. One night, will they all join together—will they destroy the rooster coop?” Although Balram is quick to disclaim the possibility of “an Indian revolution,” these scenes align slum magic with a new constellation of possibilities. Ever so slightly, the tour of slums stereotyped in the book veers away from scenes of abjection and civilizational inertia to focalize the widespread discontent that celebrates the postcolony’s engagement with global ascent. Slums suddenly become thick with murmurs of dissent that could foment into subversive action against the sort of exploitation that makes them seem obscene. Rather than fetishistic specters of difference, slums should be approached, this new orientation of the stereotype suggests, through an analytic that privileges modes of communication. Listening to what is being said may be more important than merely

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looking. More salient, however, is the emphasis on the mimetic dimension of the stereotype itself. The partly disclosed scenes of reading in which slum dwellers huddle together and read powerfully resignifies the stereotype’s rhetorical effect beyond the borders of South Asia. Of course, it is worth noting that this progressive realignment of slum life with educated dissent is in keeping with the bourgeois sentiment about literacy that for certain Anglophone reading audiences—as well as possibly the author, Adiga, himself—keeps alive the possibility of a humanist solution to the problem of poverty. What such a utopian belief demands of us, nonetheless, is that we reckon with what Walter Benjamin, in describing the mimetic faculty, identified as the magic inherent in language, the power “to read what was never written.” Our encounter with fictional forms of slum life is in Benjamin’s sense about how we read such scenes in relation to our own place in the world, on the basis of similarity as much as difference. The magic that stereotypes of slum life enliven is more than the simple romance that Slumdog proposes or the radical violence that Balram enacts. It may be grasped in part by the stereotypes’ complicity in language itself which incorporates within it previous forms of magic: “Language,” Benjamin contends, is “a medium into which earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic.” In a utopian vein, the opening of slums to reading compels us to recuperate the “nonsensuous similarity” that Benjamin envisions is made possible by the “nonsensuous iconicity of the sign.” Here, this is the stereotype of slums pointing to what is perceived as antithetical to slum life, the act of shared reading. So where does all this leave us? My argument has been that slum stereotypes in global novels are representative of some of the most searing prejudices toward slums, which at the same time lead us to consider and even alter our vantage point. Fictions are not the only means by which stereotypes proliferate; neither are global fictions the only source of slum stereotypes. They are just the most imaginatively pliable carriers of stereotypes. After the release of Slumdog, there was a flurry of media stories about Mumbai slums. In one, journalist Simon Crerar, flush with the romance of the film, goes on a journey to discover slum life. He writes in the Times (London):

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Across a filthy, rubbish filled creek we enter the slum’s heavy residential area. . . . The few hours I spend touring Mumbai’s teeming Dharavi slum are uncomfortable and upsetting, teetering on voyeuristic. They are also the most uplifting of my life. Instead of a neighborhood characterized by misery, I find a bustling and enterprising place, packed with small-scale industries defying circumstances to flourish amidst the squalor. Rather than pity, I am inspired by man’s alchemic ability to thrive when the chips are down.

Fictional stereotypes caution against such effusive portraits that deploy every negative stereotype of slum life—as teeming, filthridden—in narratives that affirm slums as sites of labor completely commensurate with globalization. Moreover, the kind of identification through difference Crerar professes where the radical difference of slums is meaningful only insofar as it valorizes Crerar’s own life is what fictions about slums ask that we reconsider. The “bustle” and “enterprise” Crerar celebrates as the distinctive “alchemy” of slums we are asked to remember are no less conditioned by the unique “transubstantiation of poverty into capital.” As Mike Davis is at pains to note, the informal magic invoked by slum stereotypes, especially such as those in popular media, ignore the invisible dependencies, the lack of contractual recognition, the abuse of vulnerable work forces, the hyperextraction of labor—in sum, the sheer desperation of the third economy that forces slum dwellers toward “quasi-magical forms of wealth appropriation.” The stealth defiance and work piracy that seem normalized in slums more often than not is a reflection of the profound erasures operative in slum life. Quite aptly, Balram reflects a deep pessimism toward his work that is not visible to the voyeuristic Crerar, who finds slum labor so inspiring: “I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity and so the Tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience,” Balram declares. Indeed, it may be said that global fictions that stereotype slums direct our attention to the partiality of our gaze on slums, and by extension, on the global south. Stereotypes of slums reveal the deficit in our attempts to “learn from below” in order to “rearrange our desires,” which Spivak advocates as the only ethically legitimate approach to subalternity. Fictional stereotypes do not make this kind of ethical work

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happen, but they do compel us to confront our own complicity in reading slum life in particular relation to our own privileges. To the extent that these stereotypes further a view of South Asia’s place in the world, they signal the need to attend to the ways in which our own desires are expressed through the stories we tell ourselves about fortitude and despair in other worlds.

4 THE DEAD THAT HAUNT ANIL’S GHOST SUBALTERN STEREOTYPES AND POSTCOLONIAL MELANCHOLIA

After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America—as far as we go, they are only the negation of all that we ourselves stand for and are. . . . Ceylon is an experience—but heavens, not a permanence. —D. H. Lawrence, 1922

The problem here is not the Tamil problem, it’s the human problem. —Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost

The “human problem” at the core of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost is about the tidal waves of wounded affected by the political violence in Sri Lanka. The novel’s account of the disinterred, disappeared, assassinated, and injured reflects an archive of death. “We seem to have too many bodies around,” Sarath, one of the main figures in the book, laments. The sheer magnitude of human loss signals the impossibility of properly recognizing the full humanity of all the actors in this conflict, much less grieving their loss. The usual ways of memorializing individual deaths that denote a singular, subjective life—through details such as place of belonging, linguistic and familial ties, ethnicity, name, age, and occupation—become insufficient for explaining the losses that are incurred. Human rights and human wrongs, the novel implies, can no longer be adduced on grounds that value the sentience and security of the

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individual, historically legible subject. Rather, Anil’s Ghost presents us with a “human problem” of a different order, one that parlays collective death in generalizable terms and, by extension, our common vulnerability to violence into a new subjective experience. Anil’s Ghost enacts a humanity haunted by the ubiquity of death—anyone can die, anywhere, and instead of anyone—and in so doing demands that we alter how we respond to and recognize humanity itself. When anchored to the postcolony, a vision of humanity haunted by collective anxiety about its existence cements a problematic stereotype. Indeed, Anil’s Ghost is not unique in furthering a vision of pervasive violence stoked through representations of calculated or accidental death, as well as of societal decline. A cursory survey of contemporary South Asian novels yields quite a list: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shame, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke, Omair Ahmad’s Jimmy the Terrorist, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner, Mohammed Hanif ’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, and Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, to name a few. Such novels invoke discrete historical contexts—the partition of the subcontinent, political assassinations, war and Western intrusions, caste and gender violence—to animate the idea that life in the postcolony is risk-prone and violent. This chapter examines representations of violence in Anil’s Ghost to probe paradoxes that arise in postcolonial fictions that deal with specters of death moored to a particular place and real events. Fictional preoccupations with violence within postcolonial literatures, especially when linked to real historical events, seem to shore up dubious stereotypes about insurmountable civilizational differences that structure our globe. The risk is that Ondaatje’s Sri Lanka, like Lawrence’s Ceylon, will remain only a foil for the West’s self-assurance and self-complacency, a vision of “impermanence” against which to measure Western stability. After all, Ondaatje’s odes to Sri Lanka—Running in the Family, Handwriting, Anil’s Ghost—are written from Canada. In Anil’s Ghost, Sailor’s murder in the midst of a tumultuous civil war and the murkiness of seeking redress for it suggests that the novel endorses a stereotype of civilizational difference where the generic fictionalization of mass deaths leads readers to affirm the meaninglessness of individual life in the postcolony. Yet this chapter

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takes an alternate tack. How, I ask, does a stereotype’s entanglement with fiction allow a different set of ethical concerns to emerge around its foundational premises? By foregrounding violent death as a staple of the postcolony, novels such as Anil’s Ghost implicate us as readers in a host of assumptions entailed in seeing the postcolony as an archive of death. Certain postcolonial literary texts, even as they advance a stereotype, imaginatively disable the fictions that make such stereotypes durable in the first place. The prism of death in Anil’s Ghost makes a critical demand that involves relinquishing settled notions of how we as humans understand our finitude, understand our entanglements with the deaths of others, and ascribe meaning to death itself. Fictional stereotypes of death and violence provide volatile aesthetic scripts that conjoin historical circumstance with phantasmic expressions to raise important questions about mourning, collective agency, and the subalternity of postcolonial societies. The stereotype’s figural reproducibility of violence in the novel’s formal experiments, affective signatures, and deliberate transnational gestures reform commonplace ideas about the worldwide deployment of human rights projects. Stereotypes of human injury compel us to reenvision human subjectivity on the basis of a politics of collective human sentience that goes beyond the individuated forms of human sovereignty allowed by legal, juridical orders. While the dead body of the other focalizes attention on the disciplinary modes of governance in the postcolony that result in widespread subjection and takes its model from the rationalization of biopolitics in the West, its literary expression exceeds this hermeneutics of corporeality. As a metonym for the many others who remain unnameable and unaccounted for, the death of the one raises larger ethical questions about our responsibility for the suffering of others. In this novel, but also in the larger global literary imaginary, the figure of the dead subaltern stands at the crossroads of life understood in terms of an imperfect balance between singular and collective experiences of trauma in the postcolony. This chapter thus examines the role of postcolonial literature in figuring the postcolony’s exceptional tie to subalternity as the basis of stereotypes of global difference. If subalternity is understood as the boundless demand for recognition made on behalf of a radical other, its larger affective signification given through stereotypes pits one vision of collective human sentience against the hegemonic concern for

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individual human subjects furthered by human rights discourses. As Anil’s Ghost shows, because stereotypes of societal death and violence are polysemic in their formal structures, psychic investments, and global iterations, they are also unsettlingly paradoxical. Stereotypes about subaltern difference are capacious and contradictory aesthetic signs that conjoin fictional inventiveness to psychic and social terrains in unforeseen ways. When we encounter them in fiction, they remain imaginatively compelling because they encourage us to assess our deepest assumptions about the way social life is lived and should be approached in the global south. APPROACHING THE UNHISTORICAL DEAD

Anil’s Ghost adopts a volatile aesthetic by pitting the novel’s narrative structure against story and theme, a formal strategy that unsettles how the novel’s stereotypic allusions to Sri Lanka as the place of undifferentiated mass deaths may be understood. The novel advances the idea that no wounded or dead person can again be accorded whatever prior socially coherent subjective self they may have inhabited. The narrative shadows the arrival of forensic expert Anil Tissera, a Sri Lankan native who, after a fifteen-year absence, returns to the country in the early 1990s as an advocate for a human rights center in Geneva. Soon Anil, along with Sarath, a local archaeologist assigned by the government to work with Anil, unearths the remains of a recent killing in a governmentprotected burial site in Bandarawela. This discovery of the skeleton they name “Sailor” drives the story. Anil’s quest to identify “Sailor,” to make an evidentiary case against the abuse of governmental power, is underscored by her initial confidence as she argues with the doubt-prone Sarath, “But we can prove this, don’t you see? This is an opportunity, it’s traceable. We found him in a place that only a government official could get into.” However, as Katherine Stanton and Yumna Siddiqi note, by making Anil’s findings initially suspect, and ultimately inconsequential, Anil’s Ghost unsettles the edifice of crime and punishment and, hence, the entire apparatus of judiciary and legal redress for political deaths. If, as Ondaatje writes, “in her work, Anil turned bodies into representatives of race, and age, and place,” the certainty and usefulness of such a subject reproducing task is cast in doubt by the form and arc of the narrative more suggestively than the novel’s plot or theme. Aside from

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Anil’s realizations that for now her findings “would be reported, filed in Geneva, but no one could ever give meaning to it,” the novel repeatedly evacuates the importance of her report on Sailor by fragmentary interruptions that detail an overabundance of such deaths in the forms of episodic vignettes, reportage, or simple lists. An episode of politically motivated murder is related in a jarring segment. This brief interlude describes a government officer being yanked from his seat and pushed out of a fast train shuttling through a tunnel. The incident is left unanchored from the rest of the narrative. Ondaatje also inserts “lists” of the disappeared with names, dates, times of disappearance, and snippets of life-details (“The colour of a shirt. The sarong’s pattern”): Kumara Wijetunga, 17. 6th November 1989. At about 11:30 p.m. from his house. Prabath Kumara, 16. 17th November 1989. At 3:20 a.m. from the home of a friend. Kumara Arachchi, 16. 17th November 1989. At about midnight from his house. Manelka da Silva, 17. 1st December 1989. While playing Cricket, Embilipitiya Central College playground. Jatunga Gunesena, 23. 11th December 1989. At 10:30 a.m. near his house while talking to a friend . . .  The list, as Sophia McClennan and Joseph Slaughter note, “reproduces” a 1992 Amnesty International report on “unresolved disappearances” during the Sri Lankan civil war that was brought, to little effect, before the UN Commission of Human Rights in 2005. Ondaatje’s list names ten missing persons and marks the surfeit of the “unhistorical dead” as always in excess of Anil’s attempts to historicize Sailor. The names of the “disappeared” appears across from an enigmatic description of the “National Atlas of Sri Lanka,” whose indices of geological life, flora, fauna, and weather of the island are markedly empty of human presence. “No depiction of human life,” Ondaatje writes, before filling in this blank with the serialized names of those vanished by war. Anil’s discovery of Sailor’s identity, as it is abruptly revealed later in the text (“He was Ruwan Kumara and he was a toddy tapper”), floats as a similarly hollow echo of yet another of the uncountable dead the novel has already listed.

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The “human problem” at the crux of this novel about political violence is, Yumna Siddiqi argues, about the failure of a historical analytic for redressing the violations and dehumanization of civil war. Anil’s persistent question about Sailor—“Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices?”—followed by her urgent conviction that “to give him a name would name the rest” is undone by the multitudes of others like him. “He was a victim among thousands,” Anil realizes, and asks, “What would this [her finding his name] change?” The doubts that plague Anil’s belief in the restorative capacity of her mission imply that the individuation of death remains indeterminate in this text such that neither the affixing of an identity nor its metonymic referentiality attest to the atrocities of violence. Rather, the undifferentiated dead become unruly and imperfect metonymic ciphers useful for marking death in terms of substitution, and the violence that attends it, as perpetual. Sailor’s death cannot rationally point to all others who have died or are dying and is in this sense rendered meaningless. Stripping historical meaning from this one death, however, unleashes the figurative as well as the affective replacements this novel produces as its vision of proximal yet universal death in Sri Lanka. Sailor’s death, in its emptiness, is endlessly capacious—alluding to every other named and unnamed dead person, as well as to the risk his skeleton poses to all the main characters. Anil barely staves off her own political killing; her aide, Ananda, attempts suicide; Ananda’s missing wife, Sirissa, appears posthumously in a surreal moment as Sailor’s reconstructed face; and Sarath is murdered. Confronting Sailor, Anil’s Ghost suggests, is a confrontation with death writ large—as a proximate and shared condition that works through an illogic of substitution. Death here is not an exceptional, irreplaceable, and unsharable ontological experience unique to the individual. It is best understood as an endlessly reproducible event that enfolds all who come within its purview. Reading Anil’s Ghost is, hence, like entering an open crypt where the book itself serves as a repository for death’s relational and recursive form. CULTURES OF MASSACRE, THEATERS OF DEATH

Let us turn to a consideration of how living continuously with, after, and through death in the manner described by Ondaatje alters the singular-

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ity of the subject and our sense of the social. Michel Foucault has most famously conceived of sovereign power in terms of life and death by insisting on a shift in attitude between the ancients and the moderns. The notion of biopower inaugurates a new tolerance for “life.” Modernity is distinctive from prior exercise of sovereignty precisely because in modernity the threat of “death” or “the ancient right to take life or let live,” as Foucault notes, is “replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” The idea of biopower as an exalted regard for life is conditioned, Giorgio Agamben argues, on the notion of “Bare Life.” The necessary corollary to modern security regimes that ostensibly guard life are the negligent and sanctioned deaths of certain populations, those figures of “bare life” who are killed with impunity because they are deemed risky to the state’s life resourcing economies. Agamben terms this form of sovereign power—life-affirming while death-giving—the “State of Exception” in which we live, as having risen with the discursive arrival of “man” as the subject of rights during the French Revolution. If Foucault and Agamben are concerned with the way modern sovereign power expresses itself politically, Achille Mbembe considers “the manners of living and risking death that  .  .  . are situated beyond the political” but produced by everyday, everywhere instantiations of power, or what he elsewhere terms “necropolitics.” “These are,” Mbembe writes, “essentially, extreme forms of human life, deathworlds, forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life that confer upon them the status of the living dead (ghosts).” Mbembe extends Foucault’s analytics of biopower toward a conception of colonial and neocolonial forms of violence. Mbembe makes the case that what are often understood as the normative bases of modern subject formation—namely, reason, self-institution, agency, individual autonomy, and freedom—obscure seeing modernity as a moment of “multiplicity” in which subject constitution occurs through different forms of subjection: I start from the idea that modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignty—and therefore of the biopolitical. . . . My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human

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existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations. . . . Instead of considering reason as the truth of the subject, we can look to other foundational categories that are less abstract and more tactile, such as life and death.

With necropolitics, Mbembe defines subjectivity itself as contingent on death, rather than on life, all the while arguing for the uneven yet extensive global reach of necropower. For Agamben, “bare life” is life lived in the camps, in the limbo between life and death, in the sudden and sure executions, and in the detainees’ extrajudicial status that maintains the camp in a “state of exception,” which is also to say as a “zone of indifference” to normal law. “Homo sacer” as life bared in camps is the “absolute conditio inhumana” which ascertains that the biopolitics of governance as an isomorphism of territory, birth, and nation-state “enters into a lasting crisis.” Necropolitics is an examination of this crisis on a global scale that traces in plantation slavery (United States), apartheid society (South Africa), colonial occupation (Africa and elsewhere), Zionist settlements (Palestine), oil wars (the Gulf region), and sectarian violence (Kosovo), the multiple subjections through which death is made an intimate feature of modern sovereignty. Foucault theorizes biopolitics as a conundrum for the modern state’s guarantees of welfare. If “making live” conversely also meant “letting die,” the life-fostering promises of sovereign power also entailed a death conferring negligence of certain populations. This perverse logic of modern sovereignty is what Mbembe assumes as given in his characterization of necropolitcs as an extremely violent and prevalent form of contemporary biopower. Additionally, he identifies a “maximal economy” of “massacre,” a “new cultural sensibility” in which killing becomes a form of “play” or “fantasy,” and “cruelty” becomes an act of “leisure,” for those inhabiting the neocolonial “zones in which war and disorder” manifest interminably as necropower. In his earlier work, On the Postcolony, Mbembe explained colonial commandement as the coercive methods of police surveillance and discipline used to produce subjugation through compliance and imitation in the colonized. In his later work on terror and necropolitics, however, he argues that “deathworlds” created by more pervasive, flexible, and hence more tragic “technologies of destruction” derive from and yet exceed the disciplinary modes of commandement in

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postcolonies the world over. The prevalence of massacre, along with the myriad theaters and fantasies of death and the evacuation of any possibility of asserting blame or holding particular subjects culpable, muddy social life to the extent of precluding any cogent history. The “casual sense of massacre” that pervades Anil’s experiences of being in Sri Lanka is a reflection of the culture of massacre that defines the social terrain of Anil’s Ghost. Suicide bombs, terror attacks, kidnappings, clandestine executions, and murder unpredictably derail Anil’s attempts to synthesize a human rights narrative around Sailor’s body. As Anil realizes very early on, the social life of this postcolonial nation is strewn with signs of death-as-massacre that demarcate it as an altogether other space of “morality” and “tragedy.” “But here,” Anil notes in contrast to life lived in the West, “it was a more complicated world morally” because the daily scenes of lifelessness and violence invoke Sri Lanka’s difference: The streets were still streets, the citizens remained citizens.  .  .  . Yet the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here. Heads on stakes. Skeletons dug out of a cocoa pit in Matale. At university Anil had translated lines from Archilochus—In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by. But here there was no such gesture to the families of the dead, not even the information of who the enemy was.

Specters of death, in other words, haunt Anil’s Ghost as it takes account of the human toil that a vertiginous war has on defining the nation’s social character. Time and again the narrative is arrested by depictions where its characters confront the senselessness of massacre. “The bodies turn up weekly now,” Sarath tells Anil. “Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. . . . A couple of years ago people just started disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burned beyond recognition. There is no hope of affixing blame. And no one can tell who the victims are. . . . What we’ve got here is unknown extrajudicial executions mostly. . . . Murders committed by all sides.” Sarath’s brother Gamini, a doctor, is described as “continuously awake to those dying around him,” because even as he tries to “not deal with the dead,” he works with the knowledge that whenever the hospital doors open, “a thousand bodies

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slid in, as if caught in the nets of fishermen, as they had been mauled.” Such scenes of generic massacre resolutely mark each subject’s inability to lend coherence to—or even recognize—their own location within a social world vacated repeatedly by empty multitudinous specters of violent death. There are no “gestures” here other than to the dead. The social space of the nation itself is flattened so that all that stands out in these representations is the “morphology” of massacre in which “lifeless bodies are quickly reduced to the status of simple skeletons” and inscribed “in the register of undifferentiated generality: simple relics of an unburied pain, empty, meaningless corporealities, strange deposits plunged into cruel stupor.” Representations of massacre culture confirm the fragility of both social and subjective relations. Indeed, the morphology of massacre Ondaatje equates with Sri Lanka is arguably about the evaluation of human pain and suffering, the ethical value of human life in the absence of the normative gestures to life—memorializing, marking allegiances, and family ties—that produce a subject’s place in their social world. In short, those highly prized compasses through which subjectivity and life are coincidentally articulated are short-circuited by the novel’s accent on massacre such that theaters of death are the only form of subjective living possible in this context (figure 4.1). One such theater of death occurs when Sarath describes being witness to a casual yet unforgettable moment of coercion during a time when there was “terror everywhere, from all sides” and “law [was] abandoned by everyone.” Sarath reveals an exceptional imprint of how utterly mundane encounters with death infiltrate the manner of living, seeing, and narrating the experience of those within cultures of massacre. He “tells” of having “seen” the capture of a man in broad daylight. He recalls how this man, shoeless and blindfolded, is forced to “sit awkwardly” on the crossbars of a bicycle, clutching the cycle’s handlebar and the neck of his captor for balance as they “wobble” off together surrounded by armed escorts. Ondaatje notes that this event stays with Sarath because of its performative resonance; it was, we are told, “in an odd way ceremonial.” For him, the abduction is a ritual staging of the insinuated death threat that accompanies it—a threat that expands to enthrall all who “witness” it or its telling: “Why transport a blindfolded victim on a bicycle?,” Sarath asks, before realizing that such theatrics were necessary because “it made all life seem precarious. It made all of

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Figure . Reverse theater of death. A doctored image of Tamil Eelam leader Velupillai Prabhakaran that went viral on pro-LTTE sites such as Tamilnet.com at the time of his assassination. The sites claimed that he was “alive and safe” and was amusedly watching government television evidencing his death.

them more equal. . . . The blindfolded man had to balance his body in tune with his possible killer. . . . Of course the reason they did it that way was so none of us would forget it.” This is one of many instances in Anil’s Ghost in which the “play” of death is enacted as a cultivated cruelty of manners that affect all who are proximal to it. As Sarath knows, the careful and leisurely orchestration of this play marks an unforgettable “intimacy” that is “disturbing” because it makes “all life” precariously “in tune” with being killed. These moments mobilize the narrative because the novel enters fictionally into this play of death. Sarath’s tale brings Anil into the fold of a subjective intimacy with death just as the novel inaugurates such an experience for how a reader might read Sri Lanka in it. The experience of collective death becomes subject conferring within the economy of the novel, and without. In her analysis of “terror” in Anil’s Ghost, Margaret Scanlan

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points to this extratextual dimension of the novel when she writes that Ondaatje’s “distinctive achievement in Anil’s Ghost is to create a narrative structure that replicates the experience of terror” for its readers as much as within its fictional world. Both readers and characters, Scanlan notes, are forced to engage in imperfect “acts of reconstruction,” catching only fragmented and fleeting scenes of life as Sarath does, in a world perpetually disrupted by violent deaths. MAPS OF GLOBAL INJURY: A SUBALTERN AESTHETICS

Despite its resonance for those who witness it, the paradox of dying is that it is not subject constitutive. Yet Anil’s Ghost forces us to contemplate the damages entailed in living proximally to death, suspended between one’s subjective attachments and the inert object status of corpses. Mbembe’s postcolony, the zone in which subjects are borne on the verge of, and through myriad negotiations over, death attends to this paradox, as does the subaltern, whose devalued life uniquely signals the failures of the postcolony. The critical discourse on subalternity is relevant here to fictional constructions of a global map of injury for two reasons. First, in postcolonial studies the figure of the subaltern stands in exceptional difference from sites of privilege, rights, and access typically authorized by the modern nation. And second, subaltern claims for recognition appear discursively as a zero-sum game over life-and-death struggles. If Anil’s Ghost represents Sri Lanka as a deathworld, it has the additional effect of casting the entire postcolony itself as a place of subalternity. Promises of life and security, the hallmarks of modern sovereignty, come unmoored in such deathly renderings of the postcolony. In this particular literary cast, Sri Lanka emerges as part of a worldwide traumatic terrain that instances what, after Gayatri Spivak, may be termed the place of a “subaltern effect.” The subaltern effect of the postcolony in Anil’s Ghost resides in its depictions of the precariousness of life in Sri Lanka. The exemplary associations of subalternity with death signal how the postcolonial literary text serves as a mode of disclosure that demands a different way of apprehending and responding to how deathly violence is globally allocated and experienced. Such novels transpose violence done toward particular subalterns who are excised from history onto a more general reflection of

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violence incurred in postcolonial societies. Ondaatje’s ancestral memoir, Running in the Family, which describes the decadence and decline of his extended Burgher clan in colonial Ceylon, for instance, begins by casting the continent of his birth with a foreboding sense of demise: “Asia. The name was a gasp from a dying mouth. An ancient word that had to be widespread, would never be used as a battle cry. The word sprawled. It had none of the clipped sound of Europe, America, Canada.” In the throes of a death rattle, the continental space of Asia becomes a flattened crypt juxtaposing the ruins of the colonial family of Ondaatjes with that of the colony. Running, by recounting Ondaatje’s return to Sri Lanka as a journey into “jungles and gravestones,” presages the nation’s birth as a moment that conjoins the false grandeur of old onto an infirm subaltern present. The risk of seeing Sri Lanka’s emergence from colonialism as devolution into a repressed subaltern state is manifold. For one, it promotes an unexamined nostalgia for a colonial past. It also lends itself to the immense flattening of the heterogeneity of postcolonial space as a space of failure. Nonetheless, it is worth considering why death is often theorized as the necessary precondition of the subaltern’s entry into textual worlds, and how this affects the ethical impulses of postcolonial writing. In postcolonial studies, the death of the subaltern has been critical in framing the absence/presence of subalternity within a text. Gayatri Spivak’s well-known assertion that “the subaltern cannot speak” is made in the aftermath of her analysis of colonized women’s deaths by sati, and the suicide of the young anti-colonial nationalist Bhuvaneswari Bhadhuri. Similarly, Spivak’s fruitless search for the rani of Sirmur, who is nowhere to be “found” in nineteenth-century colonial archives, while officers of the raj plot to annex her kingdom, dissolves into unconfirmed suspicions that the rani became a royal sati. The subaltern’s death as demand for recognition is likewise made by the deaths of Mary Oraon, Douloti, Dopdi, and Jashoda, among others who figure as the women subalterns in Mahasweta Devi’s prolific stories about the indigenous tribes of West Bengal (e.g., Breast Stories and Imaginary Maps). As Rajeswari Sunder Rajan notes, “Subaltern death, or the dead subaltern, poses questions about the manner of death, but also about the meaning of death, . . . in a postmortem communication that traverses the boundary between the living and the dead.” Even

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if the subaltern cannot speak while alive, subaltern death appears as the trace of a muted speech in order to provoke a labor of affect that responds to and seeks to mediate the impossibility of subalterns as subjects within texts that attempt their representation. Ranajit Guha’s “Chandra’s Death” explicitly makes this effort on behalf of Chandra, a lower-caste Bengali widow whose death from a coerced abortion was tried in nineteenth-century colonial courts. Guha’s essay is seminal among the numerous studies by the Subaltern Collective because of its overtly feminist focus but also because it struggles to reconstruct Chandra’s story from a fragmented and dismembered legal archive. Partial testimonies—by Chandra’s sister, Brinda, who helped perform the fatal abortion; by her mother; and by Magaram, the brother-in-law who impregnated her and ordered the termination—offer no inkling of Chandra’s own position. What the essay evinces instead is the historian’s attempt to respond to subaltern death by arguing for an ethical reading of Chandra’s plight as a retrospectively construed moment of female solidarity, defiance, and tragedy. As Sunder Rajan notes, in this case and others that relate subaltern deaths, “death functions as disclosure rather than as attribute in and for subalternity.” So, if death remains “the necessary condition for [the] disclosure of subaltern identity,” what kind of subalternity does Ondaatje’s representation of Sri Lanka as a killing field disclose? We may conclude that Ondaatje’s emphasis on serial, unspeaking deaths clears space for thinking about Sri Lanka as the latest edge of subalternity, one that is aligned with the whole of the postcolony. The trouble with such characterization is that it does away with distinctive ways of being human subjects in this arena. If all human beings in the postcolony are material because of their common vulnerability to violence, the subaltern effect Ondaatje produces for Sri Lanka effaces particularities of gender, race, aboriginality, and class that identify specific social differences as the basis for the subaltern’s exclusion from society. Spivak warns that “simply by being postcolonial or the member of an ethnic minority, we are not ‘subaltern.’ That word is reserved for the sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space.” This attention to specific historical circumstance is exactly what Anil’s Ghost sidesteps. What, then, are we to make of such an account of this place as the source for an endless devaluation of life itself such that we still have the

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repetition of an age-old stereotype—the island as a scene of barbarous horror where the reality of life remains indistinguishable from carnage, where all recognition (distinguishing perpetrators from victims, for example) fails? How are we to make sense of the seemingly insurmountable civilizational rupture that the novel’s depiction of violence leaves intact? After all, besides Anil, who may be unduly swayed by the influence of a liberal West, there are others who attest to the many crypts strewn over the country. The answer lies in how the novel’s absorption with death alters our ethical relation to subaltern death and to a violence that seemingly occurs elsewhere. If, as Sarath speculates in a section titled “The Life Wheel,” “parting or death or disappearance were simply the elimination of sight in the onlooker,” then Anil’s Ghost continually returns us as readers of global fiction to the thresholds of death elsewhere to alter our perception of it. To understand how the novel does this, it is helpful to return to the questions with which we began: What does it mean that the location of all manner of human injury and annihilation in the novel is aligned with Sri Lanka in particular and the postcolony in general? Does envisioning entire swaths of the globe as crypts organized around dying bodies repeat Conradian stereotypes of the postcolony as primeval and fatalistic—stereotypes that cast the global south as the eternal unconscious of the mature, developed world? Or are such stereotypes ambivalently reinvented here to suggest a contestable global model of subalternity? If so, is this model of what Kwame Appiah calls postcolonial pessimism useful as a critique of transnationalization? What are its pitfalls? “In many ways,” Ondaatje says in response to a question about his portrait of Sri Lanka, “the book isn’t just about Sri Lanka; it could be Guatemala or Bosnia or Ireland. Such stories are familiar in other parts of the world.” To the extent that Anil’s Ghost is a story about subjectivities formed anew in and through lives lived in what Achille Mbembe has so tragically termed “deathworlds,” this is Ondaatje’s invitation to expand the terrain of such biocultural zones to multiple locations across the globe. The novel’s far-flung global scope seems to dilute the possibility that assigning culpability or criminality for Sri Lanka’s violence along specific ethnic or linguistic, religious or national categories (e.g., Tamil or Sinhala, Hindu or Buddhist, citizen or foreigner) can be intelligibly made.

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Instead, Sri Lanka remains an abstract location where dying, because “the reason for war is war,” is tautologically grounded. Unable to make a forensic and scientifically sound case against the government for human rights violations, Anil flees Sri Lanka for the West with the certitude that she is leaving behind a place of massacre: “She knew she wouldn’t be staying here much longer. There was no wish in her to be here anymore. There was blood everywhere. A casual sense of massacre.” So just as Ondaatje dismantles, through Anil’s failure, the programmatic human rights discourses of selfhood that for the West focalize civil war, ethnic strife, and genocide as a problem of the East or others, he returns us once more to a world-dividing difference. This difference between secure and insecure lives is world-dividing insofar as the novel separates the metropolitan West from subaltern locations. The geographic distinctiveness of the novel’s setting on the island and the larger global circuits of its references also make this distinction transparent. Although Anil’s expert training in medicine occurs in London and the United States, her excavation of human remains—her confrontations with fields of unidentifiable human bodies—takes place in Colombo, northern Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and the borderlands of the American Southwest. The novel begins with a vignette of Anil’s time in Guatemala, where forensic work at gravesites is motivated by a collective “vigil for the dead, for these half-revealed forms” that locals keep. In juxtaposing various burial locations that conjoin the discovery of death with localized gestures of care and grief, and with a more disinterested forensic effort to rationalize its causes, Anil’s Ghost reflects generic postcolonial crypts. These crypts, as Sarath reminds us, are strewn all over and infirmly closed: “The country existed in a rocking, self-burying motion. The disappearance of schoolboys, the death of lawyers by torture, the abduction of bodies from the Hokandara mass grave. Murders in the Muthurajawela marsh.” The idea that collective death in the postcolony can be conveyed only as a universal stereotype is vital to the novel’s critique of liberal, rights-based assumptions about global violence, even as the stereotype takes on a life of its own. All narrative threads within the text converge on scenes of collective or shared death that essentially flatten the social terrain of the postcolonial nation. Hence, in another culminating moment, President Katugala’s death literally disappears into the death of the subaltern, his assassin:

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The cutting action of the explosion shredded Katugala into pieces. The central question after the bombing concerned whether the President had been spirited away. Because the President could not be found. Where was the President?  . . . There was blood on the unbroken windows. . . . Some flesh, probably from the bomber, was found on the wall across the street. The right arm of Katugala rested by itself on the stomach of one of the dead policemen. . . .  . . . The body, what remained of it, was not found for a long time.

The destruction of the president’s body along with the body of the suicide bomber eradicates political distinctions between them, those divides of “degree” and “motive” that Talal Asad argues differentiate the modern state’s perpetration of violence from acts of terrorism. The president, we must remember, is one who “claimed no knowledge of organized campaigns on the island” and who, “to placate trading partners in the West,” gave in to international pressure to allow Anil’s humanitarian mission. The subaltern assassin, meanwhile, remains anonymous, figured only as “flesh” without gender, ethnicity, age, or any other sign of social being. When Anil’s Ghost and other such novels delineate entire nations of the global south as deathscapes, they deploy a questionable stereotype that functions only through the homogenization of social actors and cultural spaces. As a consequence, the decolonial space stands apart and compressed for the explicit burden of violence it bears, becoming allied with other such spaces across the globe. Most importantly, subaltern spaces so imagined reflect human struggles of the most elemental order—over life and death—as the dominant metaphor of global dispossession. As a postcolonial crypt that serves as a repository for representing deathworlds elsewhere, Anil’s Ghost suggests that a transnational reading public may approach such crypts and respond to subaltern demands for recognition only in the most generalized terms. THE POSTCOLONIAL CRYPT: NARRATIVES OF COLLECTIVE CULTURAL MELANCHOLIA

In Anil’s Ghost, death is reflected by formal arrangements that allow alternative affective significations of its presence to emerge in the midst

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of Sri Lanka’s political turmoil. The novel intercepts the historical scene of conflict, with its global inflections, to shift the Anglophone reader’s perception of the war’s collective societal impact. Insofar as the novel figures death as an omnipresence that signifies collective trauma, rather than a peculiarly individual one, the novel comes to represent a postcolonial crypt. In their work on mourning, melancholia, and the transmission of trauma, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok usefully theorize the workings of the intra-psychic crypt and the idea of the phantom. The “inexpressible mourning” of the melancholic unfolds, they argue, as the result of “a secret tomb inside the subject” that keeps the lost object “buried alive in the crypt” as a form of psychic incorporation. Keeping the source of a trauma secret staves off melancholia as long as the crypt is secure, its secret deflected in the individual onto other afflictions such as eating disorders, unkempt appearance, filth, coprolalia, etc. It is only when “faced with the danger of seeing the crypt crumble . . . [that] the ego begins the public display of the interminable process of mourning,” which is melancholia. Otherwise, the cryptophoric subject, they suggest, develops a whole language of disguise or concealment, what they term cryptonymy, that ensures that the crypt remains buried. In these subjects, the crypt conceals the source of a trauma or loss by deliberately confusing any attempt to articulate the loss. The presence of a crypt depends on a linguistic subversion that purposefully leaves the traumatic experience of loss unintelligible, deferred to other inaccessible forms of signification. The crypt marks a precarious psychic threshold that may inadvertently, through narrative or linguistic slip, at any moment reveal a trauma it must keep hidden. Even as the crypt forestalls melancholia, the secret preserved within it marks a psychic threshold that can collapse momentarily into expressions of melancholic grief whose intelligibility is contingent on how the story being told is made sensible. As long as the secret remains encrypted—obscured by misleading language clues—the symptoms of perpetual grief that is melancholia are deflected. When the crypt “crumbles”—which is to say, its secrets buried in language are deciphered—melancholia is laid bare. The dissolution of the crypt that exposes what Freud terms “the open wound” of the melancholic compels an obsessive incorporation of loss. Overwhelmed by grief, the melancholic, according to Abraham and Torok,

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turns toward staging ineffable grief over and over again through fantasy replacements and self-directed aggression. Although for Abraham and Torok the crypt describes psychic processes of individual grief, Abraham’s idea of the phantom extends beyond personal loss to describe the workings of collective trauma. The phantom illuminates the way in which postcolonial crypts function in my analysis on a narrative level and as a generalized stereotypic symptom of a cultural condition. Unlike the crypt that entombs the loss of an object of love within the individual, the transmission of transgenerational, interpersonal, and cultural trauma depends not on what is lost to ourselves but on how we are affected by what is lost to others. Rather than the unfinished personal mourning of an individual subject, the phantom signifies “a diverse species of ghosts” that comprise the wounds buried or encrypted in others that nonetheless also affect those near them. Describing the phantom effect of crypts, Abraham writes, “What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others.” The phantasmic transmission of trauma allows that loss enclosed in singular crypts is transferable and has a ripple effect. By this analysis, individual melancholia, motivated by a particular wound, can produce a collective cultural sense of being melancholic. The phantom in Abraham’s account, passing as it does from one unconscious to another (e.g., parent to child), ventriloquizes the loss felt by another and “stages” its presence in “words.” This narrative dimension in which “phantomogenic words” hint at the presence of the “gaps left within us by the secrets of others” notably “place[s] the effects of the phantom in the social realm.” Novels such as Anil’s Ghost serve as postcolonial crypts by invoking the relational aspects of death that indicate the presence of collective cultural trauma. Unlike intra-psychic crypts that enclose loss to curtail melancholia, these texts function as phantom crypts that ventriloquize the loss of others. Encrypted stories of loss circulate recursively within the narrative to include those for whom this loss may not be primary. If, as Abraham notes, “the phantom which returns to haunt bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other,” the text of Anil’s Ghost is a phantomogenic script that bears witness to a transmission of trauma perpetuated by the many dead who are part of a generic cultural circumstance. Whereas the solitary crypt hints at a melancholia as yet undisclosed, the presence of the phantasmic

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postcolonial crypt reveals the pervasiveness of a cultural melancholia conditioned by myriad crypts that are everywhere collapsing and whose traumatic secrets are revealed, whether partially or wholly, in the stories the novel tells. Such stories encapsulate the characters whose losses are encrypted in them but are also transferred to readers involved in deciphering them. In a recent moving piece in Granta, V. V. Ganeshananthan writes of ways in which the Sri Lankan conflict has foreclosed the process of public mourning: “Grief,” he says, “is a country that looks different to each person entering it, to be sure. How,” then he proceeds to ask, “does one find fellowship or shelter in loss?” Given that most deaths in this conflict remain, even officially, hidden or covered over, he finds that indeed there is no other possibility other than to immerse himself in these deaths of those he doesn’t know: “It is a way of humiliating people, to say that their dead are not dead, to say that people are not even allowed to mourn. . . . My grief will not destroy me. In some times and places, we are given the space to build our memorials. Perhaps in others, we must learn to become them, even as we go on.” Ganeshananthan’s is an instance of the continuous process of grieving undertaken to memorialize others that a novel such as Ondaatje’s gestures toward. The story of Lakma, who, at the age of twelve, witnesses the massacre of her parents, illustrates how the novel sutures the terms of collective melancholia to formal, linguistic expression. The event of her parents’ killing, we’re told, leaves Lakma irremediably scarred—mute, prone to nightmares, regressing into “infancy” in her verbal and motor skills, and “scared of the evidence of anything human.” In this state she accompanies her sole surviving relative, the glaucoma-stricken and disgraced archaeologist Palipana, into the Grove of Ascetics, their forested retreat away from the world. It is Palipana, Sarath’s mentor, who aids in Anil’s search for Sailor’s identity by introducing Sarath and Anil to Ananda, one of the few remaining artists who can reconstruct a face for the skeleton. Yet we are told that Palipana’s professional fall from grace comes from having “step[ped] into another reality,” where the archaeologist “began to see as truth things that only could be guessed at.” Palipana’s skepticism toward “truth,” his conviction that “in our world, truth is just opinion,” stands counter to the certainty of Anil’s claim that “the truth shall set you free!”

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Palipana’s presence serves as a counterincentive to the human rights narrative Anil seeks to valorize. Palipana’s attempts to tell “an illegal story” so that the “unprovable truth emerged” is attuned to the cryptic “secret” in which the deaths of Sailor, Lakma’s parents, Sarath, Sirissa, and the many other war dead are shrouded. Unlike Anil, who wants to tell a juridically and scientifically coherent story about these deaths, Palipana engages the “interlinear texts” that “contain the darker proofs” of phantasm in which each death resonates with the next. Such a reckoning with multiple deaths frames the violence of war as a collective experience of melancholia. As a crucible for collective melancholia, the postcolony as an open crypt becomes the site where the case for human rights violations given in Anil’s mantra—“One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims”—is alternatively nuanced. The prospect of attaining closure through juridical redress that follows the disclosure of violent acts is replaced by the compulsion to continually and collectively acknowledge the losses signified by the dead. The former, which is Anil’s way, reconciles loss with proper mourning where in a Freudian sense the lost object is recognized as dead so that the ego can find an ethical reason to move beyond it. The latter, represented by Lakma and Palipana, makes dwelling in loss, signaled by the melancholic’s refusal to move past the traumatic event, the ethical impulse of narrative. When Palipana dies, Lakma sculpts an epitaph on a rock wall at the edge of a lake. With this gesture, the novel situates Palipana’s death in relation to the trauma of Lakma’s personal loss as well as to the web of losses the reader is compelled to interpret in engaging the various crypts and phantoms that haunt Anil’s Ghost. The novel reveals: [Lakma] had already cut one of [Palipana’s] phrases into the rock, one of the first things he had said to her, which she had held on to like a raft in her years of fear. She had chiseled it where the horizon of water was, so that, depending on tide and pull of the moon, the words in the rock would submerge or hang above their reflection or be revealed in both elements.

The sentence that Lakma carves remains secret in the novel, a double encryption of the trauma (her parents’ deaths) that brought Lakma into

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Palipana’s care and his subsequent death that removes him from hers. Its very secrecy imbues the sentence with a phantasmic quality. Encapsulating as it does Lakma’s fears, Palipana’s consolation, and his legacy, it is deliberately rendered on the “horizon.” Partially obscured and partially legible (now “submerge[d],” now “revealed”), the sentence possesses the capacity to transmit its etched trauma as a form of consuming melancholic expression. For the silent Lakma, “the great generous noise of her work” as she carves the rock is voice-giving, “as if she were speaking out aloud.” Lakma’s voice in this instance parallels Cathy Caruth’s description of traumatic repetition in which the “voice that is paradoxically released through the wound” stands out over and beyond particular inflictions of injury or their dreamlike reimaginings. As Caruth shows, the wounded voice that emerges through the unconscious reliving of a past trauma—as in the case of Tasso’s lovers, Tancred and Clorinda, whose example Freud cites, or as in the secrets kept and revealed by Lakma’s carving—“bears witness” to unspeakable traumas of the past. The originary moment of trauma or wounding, Caruth argues, is eclipsed by its unknowable residual effects that continue to linger and give shape to the everlasting melancholia that is often its result. “Trauma,” Caruth writes, “is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in the individual’s past, but rather in the way its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not unknown in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.” Lakma’s secret sentence encrypts trauma because the interminable circular violence of war is both unknowable in Caruth’s sense and yet potentially voice-giving insofar as these injuries continue to grip survivors. The novel suggests that the partial disclosure of the origins of trauma inscribed in this manner endures as a palliative gesture because it lingers on loss. Hence, in the last days of Palipana’s life, Lakma focuses on “just the sentence. Not his name or the years of his living, just a gentle sentence once clutched by her, the imprint of it now carried by water around the lake.” Like other partial disclosures—Sailor’s identity, Sirissa’s disappearance, Sarath’s political allegiances, Palipana’s gesture that discredits his academic reputation, Anil’s tenuous ties to her American friend Leaf and her rift with her lover, Cullis—this sentence, despite its inscrutability, compels the reader to interpret it as part of the general landscape

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of loss evoked by the island. “The yard-long sentence still appears and disappears,” Ondaatje writes. “It has already become an old legend.” As a sign of the crumbling postcolonial crypt, the sentence becomes part of the phantomogenic aspect of Anil’s Ghost, making one person’s death material to how we read other deaths in the novel. Instead of foreclosing melancholia through the juridical accounting of individual death, Anil’s Ghost amplifies how the loss of any subject circulates indiscriminately in communion with other deaths in a collective melancholia. In other words, instead of circumventing or curing melancholia, as human rights discourse aims to, the novel compels us to experience collective loss in a way that affirms the value of collective loss. The permanence ascribed to the secret epitaph in the narrative ensures that the circuits of loss it returns us to stay embedded in the novel’s larger engagement with death as a culturewide expression of melancholia. THE DEATH OF THE OTHER: STEREOTYPE AND RESPONSIBILITY

In Anil’s Ghost the wounded are transported into the hospital through a doorway with a placard in Latin, Sinhala, and English that reads: “Let conversations cease/ Let laughter flee/ This is the place where Death/ Delights to help the living.” The sign manifests the hospital as a front in the war of “intentional violence” where doctors, such as Gamini, who repair bodies “damaged by mines, grenades, mortar shells” do so with the realization that “you were without self in those times, lost among the screaming.” The loss of self for those offering a salve to war wounds broaches the question of responsibility that undergirds the novel’s meditations on death. The hospital sign suggests that life here is proximal to death in whatever language—dead or alive, colonial import or local—it is expressed. There can be no possession of a unique self in such places because the self is always already irremediably undone by the deaths of others. The culture of massacre that in Anil’s Ghost typecasts Sri Lanka as a death-bound subaltern space reduces this postcolony to a stereotype conditioned by reigns of violence. Stereotyping damage as the defining aspect of the place has the effect of making Sri Lanka’s unique national, historical, and cultural identifications in the world seem trivial or irrelevant. Yet the stereotype ambivalently draws attention to the narrative’s

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attempt to approach the question of death and responsibility from a different angle. The violent condition of the postcolony, the stereotype implies, necessitates thinking of death beyond an individually subjective experience so that there can be a collective ethical response to it. In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida, writing on the work of philosopher, human rights activist, and political dissident Jan Patočka, reflects on the ties between death and responsibility. He begins by tracing Western genealogies of death. As Derrida notes, death, in a conservatively framed Judeo-Christian philosophical tradition that runs from Plato, to Hegel and Heidegger and onward to secular Christian theology, ties ethical responsibility toward the other to a subject’s conviction of their own “unsubstitutability.” “Death,” in this way of self-centered thinking, Derrida writes, “is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, ‘given’ one can say by death. . . . It is from the site of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is of my singularity, that I can feel called to responsibility.” Responsibility toward others modeled on the absolute insularity of the individual self where the death of the self is taken to be exceptional and noncontingent in every way remains directed toward self-preservation and thereby aloof in its concern for others. Derrida concludes that responsibility called forth in this way is paradoxically irresponsible toward others because in such a philosophy of individuated death, “There is no gift of self ” possible. Which is to say, it is impossible to die for or in place of another. Each individual is responsible for the security of life only insofar as it affects their own mortality because care over one’s own life—the ability to guard it and to be responsible for it—is what sets each person exclusively apart from others. The law of radical difference, “Tout autre est autre,” where “Every other (one) is every bit other,” governs how responsibility as a gesture beyond the self and toward others is made hollow. In this way of thinking, responsibility may not be felt or shared beyond the limits of the individual self. Again, as Derrida presciently argues, “in the exercise of justice” (in politics, diplomacy, international law, and war), “a lexicon concerning responsibility . . . can be said to hover vaguely around a concept that is nowhere to be found.” The connection between death, the ontological isolation of the subject, and the ethics of “giving” by “responding” to the death of another is what Ondaatje, and subaltern scholars attempt to rethink. The premise at

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the heart of certain Western understandings of the self is rooted in theologies of life, as Derrida points out, in which “dying can never be taken, borrowed, transferred, delivered, promised, or transmitted”; this is what is radically contested here. Within Western thought itself, detractors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Emmanuel Lévinas, and others offer alternatives to such a model. Derrida translates a moment in Lévinas’s God, Death and Time to highlight the urgency with which Lévinas reframes, in collective terms, the question of responsibility that arises with the death of others. “I am responsible for the death of the other,” Lévinas insists, “to the extent of including myself in that death. . . . ‘I am responsible for the other inasmuch as the other is mortal.’ It is the other’s death that is the foremost death.” In concert with the challenge Lévinas poses to Heidegger and others who have thought of death as an exclusively intrasubjective event, Derrida asks anew the question about responsibility not as a gesture toward the self but as one unto others. “How can one be included,” he ponders, “in another’s death?” And he answers with paradoxical rhetorical force, “How can one not be?” The ethical stakes that Derrida claims in this response are akin to the ambivalent case that Anil’s Ghost makes for the relationality of death in the subaltern space—here, Sri Lanka—where any one death can always stand in for another. In the novel, it seems that everyone is included in every death. “‘Sailor’s’ body,” is, Siddiqi observes, “more than a single body; it stands in for all those who have been brutalized by war,” which in this work is practically everyone. As we will see, it is also this reframing of responsibility as a collective rather than self-centered endeavor that motivates the novel’s critique of the accusatory form of human rights that Anil practices. The stereotype of death that pervades Anil’s Ghost marks dying as a collective, far-reaching, and global experience rather than a single event internal to individuals. The story sediments the postcolony as a place of subaltern dispossession while impelling us toward a different paradigm for how we relate to loss. Ondaatje uses the word “pietà” to describe Gamini’s transformed relationship to his brother, Sarath, on finding him murdered for his involvement in Anil’s mission: There are pietàs of every kind. [Gamini] recalls the sexual pietà he saw once. . . . There were other pietàs. The story of Savitra, who wrestled

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her husband away from Death. . . . But this was a pietà between brothers. And all Gamini knew in his slowed, scrambled state was that this would be the end or it could be the beginning of a permanent conversation with Sarath. . . . So he was too, at this moment, within the contract of a pietà.

A pietà in this case not only involves an intimacy with the dead formed through piety and pity, as the etymology of the word suggests, but also cements into permanence a contract with the dead. For Gamini, this entails “a permanent conversation” with the dead Sarath, despite their previous alienation from each other. Gamini’s life, which goes on despite his brother’s death, signals the extent to which violent loss in the novel is a part of diurnal life. As the opening of another of the novel’s postcolonial crypts, this moment highlights the need to dwell in loss, or to be melancholic, as the new ethical obligation in reconciling ourselves to the deaths of others. If the economy of responsibility goes beyond merely guarding the self and involves sacrifice of self for other, it does so by engaging death in an interpretive scheme. The “gift of death,” Derrida writes, is the essence of responsibility driven by our ability “to interpret death, to give oneself a representation of it, a figure, a signification or destination for it.” As a narrative that circulates around death, making it the condition of subalternity for the postcolony, Anil’s Ghost serves as an interpretive destination that measures how we are implicated in the violence done to others. That is, it offers a frame of signification for evaluating our responsibility toward others by seeing ourselves entangled in each violent trespass. At a moment of despair Anil recalls her favorite lines from The Man in the Iron Mask: “We are often criminals in the eyes of the earth, not only for having committed crimes, but because we know that crimes have been committed.” Struggling to piece together the uncertain narrative of Sailor’s death, the reader, along with Anil, journeys through a surplus of other scenes of annihilation and moments of knowledge. The text presents each death as an invitation to interpret our complicity in that violation, as a means of claiming responsibility for knowledge of crimes already committed against humanity.

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DISARTICULATING HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE

Anil’s Ghost is among few exemplary works that refuse any easy narrative closures where escape from one stereotype—death—is figured through recourse to other stereotypes of romantic love, migration to a pristine West, prelapsarian fantasies of the past, or the emergence of a liberal model of economic, social, or political development. Instead, Anil’s Ghost forces us to reckon anew with the terms of death as a culturedefining stereotype. To do so requires us to consider that there is no singular story of love or survival or progress here, and to ask, What do we make of a book in which an entire society is shown locked in the grip of death? What does it matter that such death, instead of being cast as a solitary ontological experience, evokes a collective cultural one? If cultural stereotypes gain fictional currency by repeatedly ascribing an attribute to a particular culture or place or people in generalized and static terms, Ondaatje’s novel participates in such a flattening. Its preoccupation with death, however, provokes questions about the values and liabilities that adhere to the stereotype in the first place. Sri Lanka’s appearance as a subaltern place entangled in “brutal human violence” is, for example, intimately tied to Anil’s itinerary there as a human rights advocate. The novel evinces a deep skepticism about Anil’s fact-finding mission, describing her as an outsider, as someone who “had courted foreignness” and “felt completed abroad.” Anil regards the victims of violence that she encounters in a way that advances assumptions about their capacity to be human within a narrow framework of liberal rights discourse that privileges language and reason as the predominant aspects of humanity under threat. Her conviction—“that those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic. It was the way to abandon emotion, a last protection of the self ”—is the basis of the case she intends to make for Sailor. “Who was he,” she wonders, “this representative of all those lost voices?” Yet Anil’s inability to restore Sailor’s voice draws attention to the limited conception of self or the restrictive “ethics of subject formation” through which concerns about human rights violations are routinely funneled. That such ideas about selfhood are culturally alien and fall short of addressing the troubles at hand is echoed by Sarath’s blunt appraisal of Anil’s work: “You know, I’d

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believe your arguments more if you lived here. . . . You can’t just slip in here, make a discovery and leave.” This outsider perspective—aligned as it is in Anil’s case with a belief in the human subject constituted through the unity of logic, language, and law—is shown in the novel as predisposed to stereotypes about the postcolony as a place of stasis and danger. Aside from a far-flung transnational network of other human rights pressure points (Guatemala, Congo, the United States–Mexico border), the turmoil Anil witnesses in Sri Lanka is subtended in her imagination to stupendous moments of human destruction, both natural and political, that are frozen in time. Pompeii, Laetoli, Hiroshima, and Vesuvius are named as predecessors to the violence in Sri Lanka such that, for Anil, “tectonic slips and brutal human violence” seem coeval in “provid[ing] random time-capsules of unhistorical lives.” Lacking reference to particular histories of conflict (colonial, ethnic, religious, linguistic) in Sri Lanka, Anil’s view of the internecine war in Sri Lanka remains atavistic, recalling prior horrors but lacking contextual compass. The notion of a generic, radarless violence is what propels Anil’s conviction that fear may be the only binding feature of humanity on the island. Traveling undercover to a remote location in search of Sailor’s past, Anil suddenly recalls the “amygdala,” the “nerve bundle which houses fear” that long ago in London had “sounded Sri Lankan” to her when she first heard it. Confronted with her inability to make logical sense of the war, Anil is newly convinced that fear pervades the most ordinary aspects of life in Sri Lanka: “She remembers the almond knot. . . . It governs everything. How we behave and make decisions, how we seek out safe marriages, how we build houses that we make secure.” The novel omnisciently reinforces Anil’s meditations with a line from Anne Carson’s Plainwater: “I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear.” Notable here is that a universal law is discovered in lieu of a human rights narrative that would restore voice and, by extension, self-hood and dignity under the law to a single unidentifiable corpse. It seems that the arbitrary civilizational norms that govern Anil’s attempts to humanize Sailor can only be tested by other equally risky postulates about the primal nature of existence in Sri Lanka—fear, archaic forms of violence, death—that tenuously unite the postcolony to a larger human community. The manner in which

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stereotypes of death and violence in the postcolony are evoked as the condition for making and unmaking the abridged form of humanity admitted under rights discourses sanctioned by the West remains, as the novel implies, largely tautological. The articulation of rights on the basis of an individual death is thwarted in places mired with the deaths of many. Anil’s Ghost formally animates such an ethics by withholding a singular explanation that resolves the mystery of Sailor’s death. Instead the reader, like Anil, is left to choose between several moments that punctuate the story, each confounding conclusions proffered by others about the novel’s investment in recounting the crisis in Sri Lanka. If the reader initially identifies with the main premise of Anil’s work as a human rights advocate—“The central truism in her work was that you could not find a suspect until you found a victim”—the various end points of the novel muddle the clarity of such logic. The irrationality of violence, the unpredictability of its intrusions, effects both affective and material transformations in this work. Anil’s work as a disinterested “reader of the intricacies of dead bodies” is compromised by her increasing involvement in the affective dimension of social violence. A dispassionate reader implicated within Anil’s “positivist philosophy” thus has to contend with the illogical progression of her investigation. Anil’s embrace of the skeleton, her inability to distinguish Sailor from Sirissa, and the lack of evidence with which she brings her report on Sailor before the government commission are moments when the narrative of human rights she wishes to tell comes to a halt. Each of these is also a moment when Sailor’s story ends: There had been hours when, locked in her investigations . . . , she too would need to reach forward and lift Sailor into her arms, to remind herself he was like her. Not just evidence, but someone with charms, and flaws. The firelight set the face in movement. But what affected her—who felt she knew every physical aspect about Sailor, had been alongside him now in his posthumous life . . . —was that this head was not just how someone possibly looked, it was a specific person. . . . There was a serenity in the face she did not see too often these days. There was no

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tension. A face comfortable with itself. . . . She could no longer look at the face, saw only Ananda’s wife in every aspect of it. What I wish to report is that some government forces have possibly murdered innocent people. . . . The skeleton I had was evidence of a certain kind of crime. That is what is important here. “One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims.”

If this novel is about Anil’s conversion from visitor, voyeur, and witness of violence to intimate participant, or, as Sarath says, her becoming “finally [one] of us,” it is also about excesses of violence that cannot be represented through the sentience of an individual subject. Nor can violence be represented by the instrumental logic of individuated crime and punishment, by the corpse counting and juridical accounting insisted on by human rights discourses and institutions. In this respect, Sailor is and is not Sirissa, and his story, precisely because finding evidence for it remains untenable, only stands in for the stereotype of collective death in the postcolony. SURVIVING IN THE AFTERMATH: DEADLY STEREOTYPES, OR IS THE STEREOTYPE DEAD?

Constituting the postcolony in stereotypes of death and violence is inherently paradoxical, and this is its unresolved problem. As the stereotype proliferates, it leads to new interrogations about the bases of its assumptions while renewing old biases. Ondaatje’s Sri Lanka is a stereotype that makes several demands. It moves us toward a new affective understanding of death as a relational human experience, a need to rethink the protocols of global human rights work, and a different paradigm for processing collective cultural trauma. However, it also stabilizes the idea of the postcolony as absolute subaltern terrain, a place of danger and deficit, one in which no one is protected and nothing but brute violence remains a constant. To acknowledge this problem is to recognize that stereotypes of violence in postcolonial contexts are volatile and stalling. As readers we may, as Anil does, escape the violent borders of Sri Lanka that Ondaatje enlivens with relief, leaving behind specters of unlawful death that seem

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hazardous and overwhelming even in fiction. Or we may, again like Anil, be haunted by our encounters with those who inhabit this other world, carrying forth a baggage that includes Sailor’s illegally smuggled skeleton, Sarath’s voice on a tape recorder, and memories of Ananda, the artificer who sculpts Sailor and Sirissa back to life. We may, on the basis of reading Anil’s Ghost, reform our ideas about death as a phenomenal as well as ontological experience, taking stock once more of how we relate to the deaths of others near and far. And we may contemplate a reform of our own interventions into hot spots of violence that seem far away but remain proximal. This tension about how Anil’s Ghost is read in the West is a concern for Ondaatje. When asked directly, “What made you tackle Sri Lanka’s civil war?” he responds: “I’ve always been aware of the conflict. Part of the problem is that I’m well known in the West, and not many Sri Lankan novelists are. What worried me is that this book would get taken as representative; I do back flips to avoid that. There’s a tendency with us in Canada to say, this is a book about Sri Lanka! But it isn’t a statement about war, as though this were the ‘true and only story’.” In spite of this disclaimer, and despite the many contrapuntal narratives it contains, Anil’s Ghost remains a book about Sri Lanka. The argument that I’ve been pursuing here is that its many stereotypes about perilous life in the postcolony unravel certain truths about how we implicate ourselves as readers of global fictions in “statements about war” and how we respond to its fallout. Anil’s Ghost is equally a book about the West as it extends itself globally. If Anil’s human rights mission—attuned to a particular mode of rationalizing human life—proves sterile, it is because the novel’s many endings refuse to absolve its remove from scenes of violence. In an anthropological study that struggles with the difficulty of rationally processing “the relentless presence—now exploding, then simmering—of violence” in Sri Lanka, Valentine Daniel writes: “Many have died. To say more is to simplify, but to fathom the statement is also to make the fact bearable.” The defining problem for Daniel is the inadequacy of instrumental reason in making sense of the irrational turns of violence he encounters on the ground. This particular stereotype about death in the postcolony is intractable because it, like the others I’ve written about in this book, has its anchor in the real. Stereotypes of death in Anil’s Ghost take us toward fathoming the problem of collective death as an

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ethical bind that moves beyond our conception of ourselves as individuated, nation-bound subjects governed exclusively by reason. As readers implicated in the novel’s depiction of collective loss and mourning, we cannot fully separate ourselves (even if we live in the West) from deaths in the postcolony. Such a separation would accept the notion that the postcolony has no historical or current relation to the West, with its own crypt of brutalities committed all around the global south in the name of reason and juridical accounting. Insofar as the reader is implicated, the place of the postcolony is not simply bounded by the geographic borders insisted on by Western ideas of nation-statehood. Anil’s Ghost tests the sovereignty of the Western self adopted by human rights discourse and rooted in the false notion of the sovereignty of the nation-state’s borders by implying that humanity is saliently interconnected on the basis of mutual attachments and responsibility. When asked about the “sense of responsibility” he felt to “make [Sri Lanka’s] plight better known,” Ondaatje recounts an old myth: “I remember reading the Indian myth, ‘The King and the Corpse.’ It’s a strange, nightmarish tale about a king who ends up with a body round his neck that he has to be responsible for. . . . The king keeps burying the body, but he wakes up the next morning and it’s round his neck again.” This is the burden of responsibility faced by contemporary novels that render the postcolony’s exceptional ties to violence. Representing the postcolony as a crypt risks the propagation of unfounded fears in hopes of shoring up unforeseen attachments. The affective dimensions of living through death that postcolonial crypts in Anil’s Ghost evoke, those moments of waking up with another’s corpse around our necks, make our perceptions of reality—as of ourselves—contingent on our imaginative capacity to be in the place of others even in the extreme moment of their death. In some measure, this is a unique attribute of fiction but also particularly in this case of the contemporary postcolonial novel. To the extent that the novel implicates us in its governing stereotype, it offers us an aesthetic script, however unsettling, for measuring our response to and, indeed, our share in death in other worlds.

5 FROM BANGLADESH TO BRICK LANE THE BIOCULTURAL STEREOTYPES OF MIGRANCY

As the reaches of the world contract in the transnational moment, stereotypes of South Asia, like its embodied subjects, are increasingly mobile. In previous chapters I have suggested that there is a particularity of place and culture that influences the formation of stereotypes about South Asia and its people. What happens when these subjects are unmoored from their physical geography and political landscape? How do stereotypes inflect the migrant experience and produce how South Asia is experienced imaginatively and materially through its diaspora? Do stereotypes about migrants draw wholesale from their counterparts rooted in South Asia, or do they mutate and change to accommodate the shifting contexts and experiences of migrants? What types of stereotypes do migrants themselves deploy to understand themselves and the people and worlds around them? This chapter considers these and other questions in the context of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. In the summer of 2006, protests erupted around the filming of the cinema adaptation of Monica Ali’s critically acclaimed novel Brick Lane (figure 5.1). According to a number of reports in the British media, residents of the real Brick Lane, the Bangladeshi enclave where the novel takes place, took offense at what they perceived to be a stereotypical representation of the community in Ali’s text. Though the protest was small, a point that Ali insists upon in a letter, the media was quick to seize upon the controversy. At stake were newsworthy issues of free speech,

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cultural values, economic fallout, and ethnic pride. Yet the terms of the debate were awash in stereotypes arising from a variety of angles that sought to define the Bangladeshi immigrant experience. One article in the Guardian, for instance, references members of an unnamed Tower Hamlets community action group who “insisted that the representation of Bangladeshis was unflattering and unfair.” The same article reports that “community leaders attacked the book on its publication in 2003, claiming that it portrayed Bangladeshis living in the area as backward, uneducated and unsophisticated, and that this amounted to a ‘despicable insult.’” In her letter of response, Monica Ali minimizes the extent of the protests, noting that “as seems to be the way with these things, press coverage began . . . with the reporting of the views of one or two selfappointed ‘community leaders.’” She goes on to critique the racial implications of such reporting, humorously imagining the reporter “stumbling around Tower Hamlets in his pith helmet and Empire Builder shorts, waving a notebook and echoing the old colonial cry: take me to your leader.” Though the attacks were ostensibly leveled at her work, Ali frames the discussion around media representation, rejecting what she viewed as an attempt to foment class and gender tensions within the Bangladeshi migrant community. If the Guardian sought to cast the debate as a critique of stereotypes about migrancy circulating in Ali’s text and film, Ali herself directed her critique at the Guardian for trading in colonialist stereotypes that depict the Brick Lane community as monolithic and isolationist. Even as evidence of significant protest was waning, speculations over free speech and censorship provoked by the protest sparked a flurry of activity in the literary world. The most prominent of participants were authors Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer. What began as a protest over ostensibly stereotypical representations in a film escalated into a war over the very essence of British and British immigrant cultural identity, if such essence can be said to exist. For her part, Greer was committed to supporting the protesters. Greer wrote publicly of Ali: She writes in English and her point of view is, whether she allows herself to impersonate a village Bangladeshi woman or not, British. She has forgotten her Bengali, which she would not have done if she had wanted to remember it. When it comes to writing a novel, however,

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Figure . Film still from Brick Lane (dir. Sarah Gavron). The image captures the layered and representational nature of identities in both Ali’s novel and the film.

she becomes the pledge of our multi-ethnicity. . . . Ali did not concern herself with the possibility that her plot might seem outlandish to the people who created the particular culture of Brick Lane. As British people know little and care less about the Bangladeshi people in their midst, their first appearance as characters in an English novel had the force of a defining caricature. The fact that Ali’s father is Bangladeshi was enough to give her authority in the eyes of the non-Asian British, but not in the eyes of British Bangladeshis.

Greer’s comments foreground the limits of what is imaginable under the banner of being British. For Greer, Ali is too British to write a novel about a Bangladeshi woman. Additionally, Greer seems to draw a distinction between being British culturally and being British by virtue of biology. Ali’s birth to a Bangladeshi father is seen as sheer biology, an accident of genealogy, which fails to accord her the cultural authority with which to write a novel about a Bangladeshi woman. Hence, Ali’s portrayal of Bangladeshis seem stereotypically foreign or “outlandish” to Greer. Yet biology intercepts culture in even more complex ways in Greer’s argument. While Ali’s (bi)racial claim to culture is readily dismissed, Greer unquestioningly endorses what she perceives as the more authentic cultural position of Ali’s Bangladeshi critics. Ali’s Britishness is cultural and linguistic in Greer’s assessment of it. Indeed, Greer

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suggests that it is Ali’s cultural identification with Britain that leads to her use of stereotypes to approximate the migrant experience: “She writes in English and her point of view is, whether she allows herself to impersonate a village Bangladeshi woman or not, British.” Yet Ali’s critics speak, in Greer’s view, with no other authority than their own racial identity. Implicit in Greer’s comments is the further suggestion that Ali’s Britishness is cultural, cerebral, and located in the language she writes in, whereas the protesters are Bangladeshi by virtue of the purity of their race. Interestingly here, Greer herself conflates the racial position with the migrant one to further a stereotype already commonly held about postcolonial subjects in Britain. Salman Rushdie, no stranger to controversy himself, takes issue with Greer’s framing of the incident. He writes: “There is a kind of double racism in this argument. To suit Germaine Greer, the British-Bangladeshi Ali is denied her heritage and belittled for her Britishness, while her British-Bangladeshi critics are denied that same Britishness, which most of them would certainly insist was theirs by right.” Rushdie points to the way in which race becomes a double-edged stereotype for the collapse of national and cultural identifications in Greer’s critique: if Ali is too British to be Bangladeshi, her critics are too Bangladeshi to be British. As Rushdie suggests, in Greer’s comments the categories of “British” and “Bangladeshi” are racial and cultural in both instances. As a sign of national identity, the claim to Britishness extends beyond the confines of race. At the same time, particularly within the diaspora, racial and cultural identities circulate beyond the boundaries of geography or place. Neither Greer’s comments nor Rushdie’s response wholly separate the biology of race from the politics of culture. Rather, what the controversy elucidates is the intersection of culture and the biology of race as the formative basis on which stereotypes about South Asia and its migrants are extended in the transnational moment. Ironically, Brick Lane is in fact deeply concerned, quite similarly, with the mapping of cultural norms onto biological imperatives to situate how migrants, particularly immigrant women, are stereotyped. These stereotypes about migrant life portrayed through an explicitly biocultural turn lead to questions over how agency, recognition, and mobility is conferred or withheld for South Asians dislocated in the imperial metropole.

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In the case of Brick Lane, the migrant’s struggle over agency, free will, and desire to belong in Britain while being “fated” with the identity of a Bangladeshi is focalized primarily through Nazneen as she seeks to define herself within her family, in the community of the hamlets, through her work as a home tailor, and ultimately in Britain. As John Marx and Alistair Cormack note, Brick Lane reproduces the conventions of a realist novel that “strains against the generic demands of realism” to address the myriad ways in which Nazneen strains to fit in socially. Cormack further claims that in fact it is because Nazneen’s migrant status constitutes her as a multiply belonging and hybrid subject that the novel’s realism “is unable to map the consciousness of this central character” and falls short of advancing “a more radical conception of subjectivity.” Yet what Brick Lane profoundly demonstrates is that “a more radical conception of subjectivity” is not available to Nazneen. The novel confirms that Nazneen’s prospective freedom in Britain can at best only be hinted at by a text that maps the biocultural limits that forcibly appropriate, foreclose, or redirect any possibility of her autonomous selffashioning by way of stereotypes. Stereotypes of migrancy that Brick Lane marshals instead pose provocative questions to the West about the West, about the paradox of its freedoms, the ethics of its own hospitality, and, indeed, its notions of humanity. Taking up the dual axes of the popular debate around biology and culture, this chapter uncovers a genealogy of stereotypes about migrancy that circulate in Ali’s text and in the controversies surrounding it. In this instance, as I have shown elsewhere in this book, these stereotypes are overdetermined. Thus, even as it self-consciously works to dispel stereotypes of the Brick Lane community, Ali’s novel also perpetuates stereotypes of both Bangladeshi immigrants and the larger British milieu within which Brick Lane is located. As Michael Perfect observes, “Ali has been accused of propagating stereotypes about Bangladeshi communities in both London and Bangladesh and, in response, has vociferously denounced the “burden of representation” that she feels has been thrust upon her novel.” However, more important than the question of whether the text ultimately upholds or critiques stereotypes is the issue of how stereotypes are constituted with regard to migrant subjectivities. The nexus of stereotypes that compete to represent the migrant Bangladeshi community have at their core a particular tendency to yoke

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biological (racial and sexual) categories of difference to cultural terms of otherness. Stereotypes, in other words, reflect biocultural expressions of power by which migrant inclusion and exclusion are measured. Of course, the other stereotypes I have covered in the book—of multitudes, slums, death, terror, and labor—are also biocultural, concerned as they are with a certain topos of how South Asians are seen and marked in their visceral as well as cultural differences for a global reading public. Stereotypes of migrancy accentuate the biocultural turns I have shown elsewhere as intersecting with poverty, overpopulation, and decay through overt plays on raciality and domesticity. The degree of a migrant culture’s difference is calibrated on the shifting grounds of racial and biological types that nevertheless reiterate. In so doing, migrants are recast each time as partially exogenous even when increasingly familiar within the places of their new domicile. The biocultural imprint of stereotypes bring theories of biopolitics to bear on cultural practices as they occur within the postcolonial metropole. My reading of Ali’s Brick Lane thus examines the ways in which strategies of cultural preservation, both dominant and minor, are conveyed by stereotypes that are imbricated within biological methods of discipline and control used to corral the West’s separation from the rest of the world. More importantly, these stereotypes reveal that prevalent social attitudes toward migrants, and of migrants about themselves and their relation to their new homes, are often tied to certain presumptions about racial and embodied differences that are reproduced at large in the cultural imaginary. Within contemporary cultural studies, culture is often theorized as an “imagined community,” or as an “invention of tradition,” where it remains abstractly disembodied even if it is mapped onto bodily practices. At the same time, the discourse of biopolitics, from Foucault to Agamben, seeks to interrogate the biological means through which states—and, I would add, cultures—maintain a certain power over their subjects. The stereotype is so compelling and so persistent precisely because it settles into and inhabits the intermediary space between biology and culture, drawing on biological differences to solidify and give meaning to the experience or perception of cultural otherness. It is at the intersection of the cultural and the biopolitical that my notion of the biocultural takes shape. The concept of the biocultural unpacks how it is that stereotypes

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about migrants fortify themselves and, indeed, acquire a kind of flexibility by drawing simultaneously on biological and cultural terms. To take the power of the stereotype seriously, we must explore the ways in which stereotypes take on material force by melding the rhetoric of cultural identity to the terms of material existence. Cursorily, prevalent stereotypes about South Asian immigrants are that they are bound by tradition and valuing of family, highly patriarchal, overly fertile, and unable to communicate except through faulty English. Each of these stereotypes functions at the intersection of biology and culture, drawing the “proof ” of the veracity of the stereotype from the biopolitics of life in order to explain differences of culture. FAMILY CULTURE

Brick Lane narrates the hopes, humiliations, and tragedies of Nazneen and Chanu Ahmed, Bangladeshi immigrants to London’s East End, and Shahana and Bibi, their two British-born daughters. Set largely in the public housing council flats of the Tower Hamlets, one of the slums of metropolitan London, the novel lays bare the wrenching desires of a family caught in the frays of culture and class. Chanu, who migrated to London after completing a degree in English literature at Dhaka University, becomes increasingly disenchanted with the limited prospects available to him in England. Defeated in his professional aspirations, Chanu enters into an arranged marriage with Nazneen, a much younger woman from a village in Bangladesh. Nazneen, unsatisfied with her kind but pathetic husband, embarks on a series of minute domestic protests— eating furtively in the middle of the night, returning unwashed socks to their drawers, and cooking food with pain-inducing levels of spice. The novel punctuates Nazneen’s narrative with letters from her sister Hasina, whose life in Dhaka serves as a jarring counterpoint to the idyllic memories of childhood that provide fantasy escapes for Nazneen. Shortly after Nazneen’s arrival in London, the couple celebrates the birth of their son, Raqib, who, despite the force of Nazneen’s love, dies in infancy before the birth of their two daughters. As the narrative unfolds, intricate webs of social relations begin to emerge within the close-knit but often contentious immigrant community. The narrative, closely allied with Nazneen’s perspective, follows a

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cast of characters who comprise the small circle of Nazneen’s new life, many of whom serve as stereotypic archetypes of community members within the immigrant enclave. Mrs. Islam, a sharp-tongued elderly woman, hides her money-lending business behind a saccharin shell and the pretence of ailing health. Razia, a feisty renegade who smokes cigarettes and speaks irreverently, is a recently widowed mother of a teenage drug addict. It is Razia who introduces Nazneen to the trade of home sewing, through which she comes to meet Karim, the young man who supplies garments for Nazneen to sew. Struggling with issues of identity and religion, Karim is a founding member of an Islamist group, the Bengal Tigers, who are mobilizing in opposition to the Lion Hearts, a collective of local fascist youths. A war of pamphlets escalates between the Lion Hearts and the Bengal Tigers as Nazneen begins an affair with Karim. Meanwhile Chanu, the failed immigrant, has devised a plan to return with the family to Bangladesh. With poignant exuberance, Chanu convinces himself that success is within reach in the form of a soap factory in Dhaka. The girls and Nazneen, however, remain skeptical of Chanu’s plan and are reluctant to relocate to a country from which they are alienated and one that the girls have never seen. When Karim asks Nazneen to divorce Chanu and marry him, Nazneen refuses his proposal and opts instead for a life on her own with her British-born daughters. In the novel’s final scene, Shahana, Bibi, and Razia arrange an outing for Nazneen to go ice skating, giving her a chance to experience the gliding feeling that she has always admired on television. The novel closes with Nazneen protesting that “you can’t skate in a sari,” prompting the final words, spoken optimistically by Razia: “‘This is England,’ she said. ‘You can do whatever you like.’” Like so much of Nazneen’s journey, the fulfillment of the final promise of the novel is left to the realm of fantasy. Razia’s claim captures a belief in the possibilities enabled by assimilation, but the novel itself fails to confirm Razia’s faith. The novel ends on an optimistic note, but it does not bring Razia’s vision into reality. Because the words are the final pronouncement of the text, however, they carry a heightened measure of importance. The irony of the novel’s ending is that it appears to leave aside the biopolitics of race, which are central to the stereotypes deployed in the controversy over the filming of the adaptation that belie the text’s alltoo-facile final gesture of hybridity. That Nazneen is able to skate in a sari

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does little to change the material conditions under which she continues to live, both within the British state and within the community of Brick Lane. Indeed, Razia’s final words reveal the extent to which the experience of hybridity is limited to the cultural imaginary. Still, Ali’s failure is not that she disregards the realities of British or Bangladeshi culture but rather that she accounts inadequately for how culture intersects with the materiality of race. But this reading, too, doesn’t capture the complexity of the text. That the final words are spoken by Razia, herself a racialized subject, works to undo the hegemonic capacity of the vision of cultural assimilation that she self-consciously presents. In a sense, the materiality of Razia’s race needs no further articulation, and in voicing what appears to be an assimilationist desire, she interrogates the limits of the turn to culture. Can the cultural realm accommodate racial difference? Is the power that attaches to race biological or cultural? Can the novel find its way out of a vortex of stereotypes competing to represent the real and fictitious inhabitants of Brick Lane? Beginning with the moment of Nazneen’s birth and ending with a moment of hybridity, the novel’s stereotypes convey the biocultural politics of belonging in Brick Lane. CITIZENSHIP, NATURALIZATION, ASSIMILATION

One moment of collapse between the real and the fictive occurs in the novel’s response to the Brick Lane bombings. In April of 1999, around the time of Bengali New Year, a nail-packed car bomb detonated outside Naz Café on Brick Lane at dinner time. Because of New Year festivities, the area was particularly crowded. The force of the explosion reduced one part of the commercial hub to rubble, with people fleeing showers of nail and shrapnel in the immediate chaos. Both the café and a restaurant next to it burned into the night and into the ground, and seven people were wounded. It quickly became apparent that the bombings were part of a targeted series of hate crimes later known as the London nail bombings. Just a week before the Brick Lane bombing, a similar explosion rocked Electric Avenue in Brixton, London’s mainly Afro-Caribbean neighborhood. In that event, forty-five people were injured. A week after, a part of Brick Lane went up in flames and another homemade device was activated in a pub in Soho, the heart of queer London. This time there were three fatalities and sixty-five injured. Soon afterward authorities arrested

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twenty-three-year-old David Copeland, a self-professed neo-Nazi who belonged to the ultraconservative British National Party and the extremist National Socialist Party. During and after his trial, Copeland said he targeted minorities because he believed in a “master race” and wanted to start a “race war.” Curiously, despite the title of the novel, Ali does not directly refer to this major incidence of violence that disrupted life in Brick Lane. The anti-assimilationist intent of the bombings is instead replaced in the novel with scenes of a riot or “disturbances” between the hatemongering white group, the Lion Hearts, and the Islamist Bengal Tigers. Moreover, the riot appears as a tangential moment in which Nazneen is embroiled only by chance because she happens to be out looking for her daughter Shahana, a rebellious teen who has disappeared. Distracted by domestic troubles, Nazneen only peripherally apprehends the chaos unfolding around her. The impressions she forms, however, are worthy of note. At one moment it seems to her that “all mixed-blood vitality of the street had been drained. Something coursed down the artery, like a bubble in the blood stream.” The next, with brick missiles raining and empty bottles flying, she becomes aware that “the multicultural liaison officer” had “crumpled on the ground.” In the panic that ensues, Ali writes that Nazneen “recognizes nothing” except a voice that intervenes saying, “Brothers, why are you fighting yourselves, Mussulman against Mussulman?” The riot chapter stands out for the exceptional way in which it eclipses the historical event of the bombing; it also unites scenes of Nazneen’s domesticity with the political prisms of multicultural factionalism through which migrants are routinely stereotyped. Her inability to “recognize” herself in the midst of the turmoil speaks to how the novel invokes stereotypes in order to query them. The dubiousness of multiculturalism and the uneasy conflicts of ethnocentrism veer from interracial divisiveness to ethnic in-fighting, and appear to be the only cognitive lenses available to someone like Nazneen. Analyzing riot culture in England, Ian Baucom makes the point that the “identification of riot as a species of contagion invokes a time-honored understanding of the crowd as a social form that reproduces itself through an act of contaminated touching.” Ali’s representation of riots clearly invokes a biocultural topos that is distinctly different from the violent carnage of hate-

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motivated killings masterminded by a single perpetrator. It mobilizes notions of crowding and chaos and biocultural fears that migrants pollute or contaminate British national identity—fears that are, as we will see, an intimate feature of stereotypes employed in political discourse about migrant integration and British citizenship. Nazneen’s sense that something about the “blood” coursing through Brick Lane alters at the moment of the disturbances speaks to this difference. By shying away from depicting the color-coded violence of race wars that rage so often in Britain, Ali chooses to deflect the question of migrant stereotypes and disenfranchisement onto the less fraught and more confused context of a riot. The question is, how well, if at all, does this slippage capture the dissolute politics of racial stereotyping and exclusion that is part of the migrant experience in Britain? To account for the vexed representation of South Asia and South Asians in Brick Lane, we must consider the stereotypes of migrant life that are already in play within Britain and that inform the background of Ali’s narrative. One profoundly influential stereotype is that of immigrants as unassimilable aliens who are somehow culturally other in an absolute sense. In “‘The Whisper Wakes, the Shudder Plays’: ‘Race,’ Nation and Ethnic Absolutism,” Paul Gilroy explores how the trope of assimilation has been used by Conservative politicians to perpetuate the notion of a unified Britain under attack by “alien” immigrants. Gilroy opens his chapter with an epigraph from the now infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech made in 1968 by Enoch Powell, a Conservative member of Parliament from the Midlands, in which Powell addresses the issue of assimilation: “The nation has been, and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by implantation of unassimilated and unassimilable populations  .  .  . alien wedges in the heartland of the state.” In an earlier speech delivered in Southall, a section of London largely populated by South Asians, Powell claimed that “it is . . . truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who would dispute with him the possession of his native land.” A comparison of the two speeches reveals a constitutive paradox within the rhetoric of Powell’s agenda. The immigrant population is represented as both “unassimilated and unassimilable . . . alien wedges” and at the same time engaged in a battle with the Englishman over “the possession of his native land.” Rather than dismiss Powell’s comments outright

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as baseless because they are stereotypical, it is important to explore the performative force that the stereotypes attach to immigrants. Indeed, the stereotypes invoked by Powell are not merely rhetorical. At stake is the very capacity of immigrants to be different from the dominant British ideal and still live (legally, socially, culturally, economically, and materially) in Britain. Powell’s rhetoric trades in and fosters familiar stereotypes about the unassimilability of immigrants to call into question the viability of immigrant life in Britain. The double bind of Powell’s message is that immigrants to Britain are at once unassimilable and dangerously in threat of assimilating, taking possession of the “native land.” In the first instance, assimilation is imagined as utterly impossible and therefore frightening, and in the second instance, assimilation is imagined as utterly possible and therefore no less frightening. Gilroy notes that “the process of national decline is presented as coinciding with the dilution of once homogenous and continuous national stock by alien strains. Alien cultures come to embody a threat which, in turn, invites the conclusion that national decline and weakness have been precipitated by the arrival of blacks.” One element of the “threat” embodied by immigrant assimilation is the right of citizenship accorded to children of immigrant parents born in Britain, a right that was later revoked by the Nationality Act of 1981. Until 1981, anyone born on British soil was by right of birth a British citizen. For Powell and other Conservative politicians, this right constituted a serious threat to the homogeneity of the nation, encouraging a division between the British nation and the uniform race of its peoples. Gilroy rightly identifies Powell’s anxiety over “the difference between the merely formal membership of the national community provided by its laws, and the more substantive membership which derives from the historic ties of language, custom and ‘race.’” The difference between the “merely formal membership” based in law and the “more substantive membership” based in race sets up the mutually constitutive paradigms of nation, nativity, and naturalized citizenship. At their core, moreover, both goals of national unity and racial purity depend upon the exertion of control over sexual reproduction. The shift from jus soli to jus sanguinis marks a corresponding shift from the nation as constituted territorially through horizontal community to the nation as constituted genealogically through vertical kinship.

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As colonial expansion became increasingly unviable and the empire contracted in the wake of decolonization, the British state sought legally to imagine itself as constituted genealogically rather than territorially. The privileging of blood over soil secured race as a primary factor around which the nation was consolidated. While the goals of territorial expansion were served by identifying the nation with its land, British nationalists, in response to the wave of postwar immigration, trained their lens on human populations rather than geographical spaces. As the global energies of the British Empire realigned around a new vision of national identity, British citizenship became predicated upon British blood, not British soil. If the model of jus soli naturalizes claims to citizenship on the basis of belonging to British territory, jus sanguinis naturalizes ties of blood and, by extension, ties of race. The new conception of Britishness based on genealogical ties thus marshals race, in addition to culture, as the bases for stereotyping migrant differences. In the racial conflicts in Britain of 2001, which provide the backdrop for Ali’s novel, race and sexuality were variously deployed to codify national and sociocultural identity. On both ends of the conflict, strategies of exclusion rest on the exertion of control over sexual mingling and reproduction in order to bioculturally manage the conditions of belonging to or being excluded from communities. British nationalists and immigrants alike invoked claims of cultural superiority asserted through the maintenance of biologically constituted notions of racial purity. Both deploy biology alongside the rhetoric of culture to limit social mingling. Within Ali’s novel, the biocultural alliance is made explicit when Nazneen asks Chanu’s permission to attend Englishlanguage classes with her friend Razia. Chanu responds by saying, “You’re going to be a mother. . . . Will that not keep you busy enough? And you can’t take a baby to college. Babies have to be fed; they have to have their bottoms cleaned. It’s not so simple as that. Just to go to college, like that.” Here Chanu harnesses Bangladeshi stereotypes of gendered maternity to keep Nazneen confined to the domestic space and prevent her foray into the British social sphere. For Nazneen, learning English represents the possibility of venturing outside of the confines of her small apartment. But it is her encounter with social and cultural spheres beyond the domestic that at once excites Nazneen and disturbs Chanu. If Powell’s fear is of the unassimilability of immigrants, Chanu’s fear is quite the

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opposite: that Nazneen is in grave danger of wholehearted assimilation. Both Powell and Chanu draw on stereotypes to undermine the complexities of Nazneen’s situation. The realm beyond the home is associated, for Nazneen, with the dual possibilities of social pleasure with her subversive friend, Razia, and forays into the external cultural world around her, each of which represents an alternative to the structured community of marital domesticity in which Nazneen is normally confined. The moment of cultural encounter is forestalled through invoking the imperative of biological reproduction, where the function of Nazneen’s body is given in stereotype as the alibi for her enclosure within the domestic space. In “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” Partha Chatterjee provides a model to think about the relationship between gender and culture in the Bengali nationalist movement leading up to Indian independence. Because much of the ideological rhetoric of empire was focused on, to use Gayatri Spivak’s words, “white men saving brown women from brown men,” the leaders of the independence movement felt compelled to account for the role of women within the nascent nation. Their response, Chatterjee shows, was to create a stereotype of Indian femininity, relegating women to the realm of culture and the home. The domestic sphere, which was decidedly feminine, was cathected with the task of protecting and advancing the cultural ideals of the nation. Drawing upon familiar models of Victorian femininity and domesticity, Indian nationalists explained the tensions between the home and the world through the relationship between femininity and masculinity. If the goals of the nationalist agenda were to imagine a nation economically and culturally independent from colonial rule, how was it possible to engage the external world without compromising the essential identity of the nation? The refusal of identification with the West was critical to the construction of an alternative cultural sphere that was decidedly Indian. Yet the realities of the colonial economy demanded that Indians continue to engage their British rulers in English language, custom, and commerce. Because this engagement happened in the external material world and was typically carried out by men, it was held in structural opposition to the traditional, spiritual realm of culture that was protected in the home by women. Chatterjee identifies a series of paired oppositions (material/spiritual, outer/inner, world/home, man/ woman) which constitute the sites of necessary encounter with Western

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modernity as well as their counterparts in the realm of tradition. The nationalist solution, Chatterjee shows, was to create an idealized notion of femininity, a stereotype of the Indian woman who would embody the purity of Indian cultural values. Women served the aims of culture by holding steady the firm distinction between essentialized notions of India and the West: The world was where the European power had challenged the nonEuropean peoples and, by virtue of its superior material culture, had subjugated them. But it had failed to colonize the inner, essential, identity of the East which lay in its distinctive, and superior, spiritual culture. That is where the East was undominated, sovereign, master of its own fate. For a colonized people, the world was a distressing constraint, forced upon it by the fact of its material weakness.

Invoking cultural terms, the nationalist resolution asserts the importance of women in the forward movement toward independence and thus defies the British characterization of Indian women as innately subjugated in India’s precolonial past. Indian women were perceived to be free from oppression within the realm of Indian culture while being cast as exemplarily resistant to colonization by the external world. By this logic, while British authority may infiltrate the material world of men, the private, spiritual world of women remained uncontaminated by the West. Moving forward into the contemporary era, this notion of South Asian femininity becomes the foundation for the stereotype that Chanu invokes to keep Nazneen confined to the domestic space. Chatterjee’s reading of the nationalist strategy provides a meaningful analysis of the intimacies of women and nation-building within hegemonic South Asian discourses, but it subsumes the biological politics of sex into a more diffuse discussion of gender. As Chatterjee rightly identifies, the nationalist resolution disembodies women from the material realm, channeling them instead toward the spiritual goals of culture. Within the nationalist resolution, but also within Chatterjee’s discussion of it, women’s politics occur primarily at the intersection of the domains of gender and culture. The biopolitics of sex and desire, then, become occluded in the discussion of gender and culture. Yet the socially constructed nature of gender and culture, which Chatterjee deliberates

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upon, does not ultimately explain the ways in which normativity operates around certain naturalized notions of sexual difference. What is unevenly accounted for in Chatterjee’s paradigm is the biological imperative that the reference to culture masks. And it is precisely this biological codification of the body that Chanu’s invocation of maternity reveals. Although in Chatterjee’s model gender is produced by way of culture, the interface of sex and ideology exceeds the strictly cultural. Indeed, it can be equally argued that what masquerades as the culturing of women is in fact the biologization of certain normative social formations, which in turn determine the range of possibilities that women are able to imagine for their bodies. Within Chanu’s discourse, staying at home is naturalized through recourse to Nazneen’s maternity. Importantly, both in Ali’s text and in Chatterjee’s analysis of the nationalist response, language is situated prominently as a critical index of culture. For the nationalists and Chanu, Bengali is the language of the home and English is the language of the world. However, the discussion about learning English is as much about biopolitics as it is about culture. Nazneen wants to go to college to learn to speak English, but Chanu’s reaction betrays a fear of the other things she might learn: sociality outside of the home, enjoyment of English activities, independent employment, etc. To speak English in some sense is to be English. The equation between speaking and being, ontologically as well as biologically, establishes the central point of cohesion in the relationship between language, culture, and biopolitics. The ability or desire to speak a given language is deployed crucially at the intersection of biology and culture. Chanu’s response harnesses language to reproductive demands made in the name of Bangladeshi culture. Language—in this instance, English—insofar as it emblematizes the domain of culture, is counterpoised against nature, represented as motherhood. Once again, the stereotype of the Bengali woman as properly domestic, cultured, and subservient is concretized through conjoining the biological terms of “race” and “sex” to the cultural ideals of Bengali nationalism. Yet the stereotype of South Asian femininity takes on new meaning in the migrant context. In the alien landscape of London, Nazneen’s role as keeper of culture also works in tandem with British stereotypes of the migrant as unassimilable. While Chanu, by keeping Nazneen homebound, wants to preserve her essential remove from British culture, the novel’s focus on Nazneen’s enforced monolingualism revives the

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common stereotype of migrant femininity as unable to be acculturated to proper English. The fact that Nazneen only knows two words in English—“sorry” and “thank you”—marks her migrancy as perpetually beyond the fluency and, hence, culture of the West. Thus, as a woman and South Asian immigrant, Nazneen is doubly impacted by the stereotypes both within migrant culture and without that in tandem confine her to the domestic space of the home. WORDS OF DISSENT

To what extent is reproductive normativity linked to stereotypical notions of assimilation and naturalization? And moreover, how do reproduction and naturalization invoke a stereotypical idea of South Asian migrant culture insofar as it is embodied in language? Broaching these questions involves looking at antagonisms within the Bangladeshi immigrant community between recent and multigenerational immigrants as well as at larger tensions between immigrants and white protectionists. Because isolationist politics are invoked through stereotypes from both ends of the racial divide, it is crucial to interrogate how racial stereotyping is claimed and valorized within the South Asian community, and how it is enforced from without, so as to demarcate—culturally, legally, and biopolitically—the immigrant from the British citizen-subject. Competing ideologies of racial separatism characterized the political terrain in the wake of the 2001 race riots in Bradford, Oldham, Leeds, and Burnley. These riots were some of the most violent racial confrontations in Britain in recent years. Despite calls from immigrant groups to recognize overt racial tensions at play, the government responded by proposing heightened regulations on English language fluency. Indeed, as state-sanctioned racial discrimination becomes increasingly untenable, juridical action based on language and custom has taken on greater significance. In the year following the riots, legislation was proposed in the British Parliament to mandate language testing for immigrants entering the United Kingdom. Home Secretary David Blunkett, in response to the series of race riots during the summer of 2001, urged ethnic minorities to develop a “sense of belonging” in Britain so that “future generations may grow up ‘feeling British.’” To further such sentiments, Blunkett proposed English-language testing for those seeking citizenship in Britain.

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Blunkett justified mandating citizenship classes, which would include language and cultural training, on the grounds that “a political community can require new members to learn about its basic procedures and fundamental values.” Even more controversially, Labour member of Parliament Ann Cryer “called on the government to consider introducing restrictions on immigrant brides and grooms who cannot speak English.” Such legislation is rooted in, and fosters, stereotypes about the practice of arranged marriages that Conservative British parliamentarians believe result in growing numbers of immigrants from South Asia. The controversy surrounding arranged and enforced marriages is situated at the nexus of cultural and biopolitical modes of control, both patriarchal and governmental working separately and in concert. Yet the discussion is deferred to the domain of language, and the proposed legislation targets the stereotype of the immigrant’s faulty English. In an interview with the BBC, Cryer defended her position as follows: It just happens that the Bangladeshi and the Pakistani community are Muslims and they happen to be the people who persist in the practice of bringing in husbands and wives from the subcontinent. The Sikhs and Hindus are doing extremely well both academically and economically and I think that it is due to the fact they don’t pursue this practice. It would be better if they selected the partners for their children from the sort of home-grown variety of Muslim Asians—that’s what I would prefer to see.

While Cryer seems to be arguing for the betterment of ethnic minority communities, her strategy serves to contain the numbers or perceived multitudes of immigrants by advocating for the “home-grown variety of Muslim Asians.” Motivating Cryer’s comments are stereotypes about what “home-grown” South Asians do and how they behave and live. Further, Cryer links economic and academic success to religious and social customs, indicating that in order to succeed in Britain, the immigrant must adhere to social and marital norms as they manifest in British culture. A proliferation of Britishness is best accomplished, Cryer suggests, by keeping the number of immigrants to a minimum. Crucially, the debates over marriage, reproductive freedom, and language arise at the crossroads of biology and culture. Cryer’s comments suggest that one

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effective means of ensuring shared cultural values is through encouraging miscegenation between citizens rather than between citizens and immigrants. The practice of marrying immigrant spouses presents a threat to the uniformity of national culture. At the same time, the barring of marriage to immigrant spouses hampers the preservation of Bengali culture within the domestic sphere of the home. By encouraging marriage within the “home-grown variety of British Muslims,” the cultural reproduction of British values is made congruent with the sexual reproduction of British citizens. The hegemonic force of nationalism is thus brought to bear upon the most intimate of personal relationships such that the legal apparatus of marriage functions crucially as a preeminent site of biocultural politics. Cryer’s rhetoric neatly consolidates stereotypes of unchecked fertility, isolationist traditionalism, and linguistic and cultural incompetence to argue for enforced control over immigrants’ biological, sexual, and cultural choices. Saving women from questionable cultural practices proves an efficient guise for implementing biopolitical strategies for containing reproduction within immigrant communities. At the same time, domesticity— and, with it, normative reproduction—is invoked from within both immigrant and British cultures as a stereotypical demand of feminine propriety. Calling forth the metaphor of “home” in both its national and private contexts, Home Secretary Blunkett said: “We need to say we will not tolerate what we would not accept ourselves under the guise of accepting a different cultural difference. We have norms of acceptability and those who come into our home—for that is what it is—should accept those norms just as we would have to do if we went elsewhere.” The trope of the domestic space threatened by “cultural difference” reveals an ideological alliance between Indian nationalists of the colonial era and British nationalists of the contemporary moment, and, quite predictably, both ideologies turn on the question of reproductive normativity to secure cultural bearing. Although the metaphor of the home invokes spatial boundaries, what are actually at stake are the cultural practices that allegedly threaten the unity of the imagined community of British nationalism. Trading unabashedly in stereotypes, Blunkett’s remarks target “cultural difference” as the source of these practices, so solving the problem of cultural difference comes to stand in for solving the problem of enforced marriages as well as the problem of immigrant

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proliferation through unregulated reproduction. In this manner, stereotypes about culture and language provide a thin veil for the actual biases of race and sex. In addition to proposals to limit immigration to brides and grooms who speak English, there have been other attempts to enforce linguistic uniformity. The rhetoric of these calls for legislating English fluency functions on the premise that linguistic unity is the key to preventing racial unrest. The British government responded to the race riots following the 2001 elections with proposals for linguistic “reform.” Speaking one year prior to the summer riots, shadow Health Minister Liam Fox complained that foreign doctors’ “‘English language skills are not up to scratch and patients are suffering as a result.’” Fox’s comment serves to center the debate about language in the sphere of biopolitics, this time through the register of health. In response, Dr. Surendra Kumar, head of the Overseas Doctors Association, noted that, given the material legacies of British colonialism, most foreign-educated doctors “have been trained in English, using the same textbooks as their British counterparts” and indeed have a high degree of fluency in the language. As Dr. Kumar notes, the training that most South Asian doctors receive ensures that they are fluent in English, more so than their European counterparts from non-English-speaking nations. Yet the image of the foreign doctor unable to communicate appropriately with his patients attaches easily to South Asian physicians, creating a stereotype that can conveniently be drawn on to reference fears over diminishing health care standards. As a result, non–European Union doctors must pass stringent language exams that, when given to fifty-five practicing British physicians, only two passed. This legislation, of course, involves more than linguistic coherence among medical professionals. The European Union requires that professional qualifications of citizens of all member countries be recognized equally by all member states. Therefore, doctors from other European nations are not required to sit for the same language exams that other foreign doctors are subjected to. But citizenship within the European Union does not demand or ensure fluency in English. Dr. Kumar says, “I have known young Spanish, German, and other European doctors walking round wards with a dictionary trying to interpret what is wrong with a patient. . . . But I have no doubt [Fox’s] comments were targeted at South Asian doctors.”

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In Brick Lane Ali writes of Dr. Azad, a physician who she represents as poised uncomfortably at the threshold of the East and the West. As a successful professional, Dr. Azad represents the dual subject position articulated by the Indian nationalists. The text lingers on the dualism of the doctor, refusing to pin him down to any easy stereotypes of migrant cosmopolitanism or nostalgic traditionalism. The doctor is a recurring character in the novel who visits the Ahmed family on occasion to share a meal and some conversation. Never having received an invitation in return, one evening Chanu takes it upon himself to pay an unexpected visit to Dr. Azad in his home. The movement between the two domestic spaces calls forth both Bangladeshi social practices and the metaphor of the home invoked in Blunkett’s speech. In both instances, it is the idealized notion of the home as the site of cultural purity that the transgression across differently constituted domestic spheres comes to threaten. In the scene of the encounter between the Ahmeds and the Azads in the doctor’s home, Chanu is perplexed by Mrs. Azad’s Anglicized behavior. The scene unfolds as the various characters are caught in the fray of competing stereotypes, which they invoke about themselves and others to defend their own subject positions. The Azads’ daughter, who speaks irreverently in English, enters the room to ask her mother for money for a visit to the pub. While Nazneen is stunned and fascinated by the permissive exchange between mother and daughter, Chanu sees it as a “tragedy” of the immigrant loss of identity. In a conversation that ensues, Chanu makes an impassioned speech about the tensions of family and culture: “I’m talking about the clash between Western values and our own. I’m talking about the struggle to assimilate and the need to preserve one’s identity and heritage. I’m talking about children who don’t know what their identity is. I’m talking about the feelings of alienation engendered by a society where racism is prevalent.” For Chanu, the struggle is primarily between what he asserts as the shared identity of Bangladeshi immigrants on the one hand and Western culture on the other. Despite his invocation of the stereotype of a stable Bangladeshi culture, what he fears is the disintegration of any coherent notion of collective values. The divisions he outlines between “Western values and our own” mirrors the Bengali nationalist theorization of the home and the world posited almost a century earlier. Indeed, within Chanu’s framing of the issue the values of Bengali culture are timeless, although they are threatened by

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the politics of place. It is because of their residence in England that the children “don’t know what their identity is.” At the heart of Chanu’s argument, then, is the belief that the return to Bangladesh would signal a corresponding return to shared cultural values. Within the narrative, however, Chanu’s belief is undercut by the letters describing Hasina’s life in Dhaka. Unlike Nazneen, who lives a fairly sheltered life in the council flats, Hasina is forced to seek employment outside the home, working as a prostitute, a domestic servant, and in the garment industry. Countering Chanu’s fantasy of Bangladesh as the site of cultural purity, the narrative constructs a spectacular, if equally stereotypical, image of third world poverty, dismantling any easy equation of home and nation through the portrait of Hasina as literally homeless. The various notions of home at play in the discourses of nationalism and domesticity are simultaneously challenged through the horrifying descriptions of Hasina’s life. That the discourses of nationalism and domesticity may be undone in unison points as well to the ways in which they are mutually constitutive and interdependent. Chanu’s vehemence about the lofty ideals of culture is met with flippancy from Mrs. Azad, who, once engaged, proceeds to counter Chanu’s assertions with equally strong conviction: “Why do you make it so complicated? Assimilation this, alienation that! Let me tell you a few simple facts. Fact: we live in a Western society. Fact: our children will act more and more like Westerners. Fact: that’s no bad thing. . . . Listen, when I’m in Bangladesh I put on a sari and cover my head and all that. But here I go out to work.” The divisions that Chanu holds fast between “Western values and our own” are sundered by Mrs. Azad, who denaturalizes the link between being Bangladeshi and sharing certain cultural values. Mrs. Azad, who is only identified by her marital title and name, rejects Chanu’s fixed spheres of culture in favor of a more flexible identity based on migrant cosmopolitanism. As the scene unfolds, Nazneen is both fascinated and unsettled by Mrs. Azad’s comments. The narrative draws out the relationship between domesticity, maternity, and the biopolitics of place. When Mrs. Azad rises to light the fire, Nazneen believes she is leaving the house to go to the pub, suggesting that the views espoused by Mrs. Azad, insofar as they are embodied in her physicality, are somehow inappropriate to the domestic space of the Bangladeshi home. But Mrs. Azad remains physically present in the home, challenging the ease with which cultural boundaries map

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onto spatial ones. However, Mrs. Azad’s rhetoric holds firm the divide between “eating curry” in her house and “working with white girls” in the world outside. The meal she serves to her guests nevertheless is described as consisting of “unidentified meat in tepid gravy, with boiled potatoes,” in sharp contrast to the elaborate Bengali meals that Nazneen prepares. What becomes clear is that in her person and in her behavior, Mrs. Azad is an emblem of unpredictability. She neither confirms the neat divisions set up by Chanu, nor does she refute them through any strict inversion. Moreover, the narrative draws an explicit connection between the pointed reference to women who “sit in the kitchen grinding spices all day and learn only two words of English” and Nazneen’s response, which was to remain “focused on Raqib.” Having relinquished her desire to attend English classes at the local college, Nazneen enacts the stereotypical vision of domestic maternity that Chanu has requested of her. Directing her gaze to Raqib, Nazneen typifies the equivalence between staying at home, preserving Bangladeshi culture, and raising children. Thus the demands of culture take on a biopolitical force that is experienced unevenly by women. Nazneen’s gaze, focused as it is on Raqib, solidifies the connection between marital domesticity and normative reproductivity. Mrs. Azad, however, interrogates the stereotypical stasis of normativity ascribed to migrant women that sutures reproduction to staying at home and raising proper Bengali children. The fact that the discussion is prompted by Mrs. Azad’s own nonnormative parental interaction highlights the extent to which Mrs. Azad is something in excess of Nazneen’s simple opposite. And despite Chanu’s attempt to cast Mrs. Azad as a stereotype embodying the dangers of assimilation, the narrative is more ambiguous. The interaction between the two women is complex, filled with both warmth and disgust. Following the conversation with Chanu, Mrs. Azad summons Nazneen upstairs, where she gives Raqib a teddy bear. The narrative captures a moment of silence between the two women: “Nazneen changed his nappy and put his pajamas on. He did not wake. Mrs. Azad smoked a cigarette. She stroked Raqib’s head with one hand and smoked with the other. Watching her now, Nazneen felt something like affection for this woman, this fat-nosed street fighter.” The narrative, like Nazneen, remains deeply ambivalent about Mrs. Azad. Although she critiques the fixed relationships between culture and the biopolitics of gender and sexuality, she, like Chanu, comes to

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a too-easy resolution. As Nazneen’s situation indicates, the kind of migrant cosmopolitanism that Mrs. Azad invokes is largely unavailable to those not habituated to it because of class. In framing the discussion as a distinction between inhabiting “little walking prisons” and recognizing that “society is racist,” Mrs. Azad suggests that racism exists only to the extent to which immigrants choose not to assimilate. Mrs. Azad serves to naturalize the link between bodily practices on the one hand and national belonging on the other, thus harnessing biopolitics to the goals of national unity and uniformity. That the discussion takes place around constant vigilance over and attention to the figure of the child consolidates the centrality of birth to the discourses of both nationalism and biocultural normativity. Yet at this moment the text seems to gesture toward a complexity that is not easily subsumed into a simple juxtaposition of competing stereotypes of the migrant community as either static and traditional or bourgeois and cosmopolitan. NATIONSCAPES

While Monica Ali both unravels and exploits stereotypes of migrant domesticity, no less important is Brick Lane’s representation of Bangladesh. The novel invokes Bangladesh as the backstory for and the imaginative other to which Nazneen’s life in London is persistently contrasted. If Ali’s rendition of life in London tropes on familiar stereotypes about migrants to challenge their one-dimensional and static quality, a similar argument can be made about her representation of Bangladesh as an alternative social space to that of London. In the preceding chapters, I have shown how contemporary South Asian texts often refract a constellation of stereotypes about slums, squalor, third world poverty, and overpopulation. Like White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire, Brick Lane, too, draws on such familiar stereotypes in its imaginative forays to Bangladesh. The organization of social space in the novel provides a critical index by which the narrative of Nazneen’s life is framed. If London becomes the impetus for Nazneen’s emergence into independence and self-sufficiency, Ali resorts to familiar stereotypes of indolence and indifference that cast Bangladesh as ruled by fate. However much for Nazneen and Chanu Bangladesh may be a place of nostalgia and longing, the narrative at large calls into question the migrants’ memories.

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The novel opens by naming the place and date of Nazneen’s birth (“MYMENSINGH DISTRICT, EAST PAKISTAN, 1967”), weaving a brief narrative that aligns the soon-to-be Bangladeshi village with the whimsies of family and fate. Nazneen, we’re told, hovers precariously between birth and death when she is placed by her mother in the hands of fate: “we must not stand in the way of Fate. Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate. That way, she will be stronger.” In Bangladesh, the novel suggests, life and death occur at the mercy of fate. Even when Bangladesh is later represented nostalgically, the intrusion of fate serves to destabilize any sense of security Nazneen can derive from the alternative life she might imagine in Bangladesh. As Bangladesh recedes further from Nazneen’s memories and desires, tropes of Eastern mysticism and fatalism collide with the representation of slums and squalor to produce a familiar stereotype of Bangladesh for the reader. By portraying Bangladesh so starkly at the mercy of fate and poverty, Ali calls into question any viability for Bangladesh to provide an alternative place for Nazneen to imagine her emotional development and, indeed, her desire to be free. The narrative as a whole works to undermine Bangladesh as a site of development because the reader is given a harrowing portrait of third world biopolitics that minimizes the challenges Nazneen faces in London. Bangladesh, in Ali’s hands, is decidedly not the space of individuality but rather is the crowded and chaotic space that forestalls independence. This is the first view of Bangladesh in the novel: Hamid ran from the latrine, although his business was unfinished. He ran across the vegetable plot . . . over the dirt track that bounded the village, back to the compound, and grabbed a club to kill the man who was killing his wife. . . . Rupban was in the sleeping quarters. . . . With one hand she held Mumtaz’s shoulder, with the other a halfplucked chicken.

Drawing on well-worn stereotypes of third world chaos and overpopulation, the narrative opens teeming with people in frenzied activity, whose rules of privacy are readily violated. The village provides a scene of disordered sociality, which defies regulation except through the divine intervention of fate. Boundaries of space, so easily transgressed in

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the village, become the structuring force of human relationships in London. It is this unruly social space of the village that Nazneen longs for in her dreams, and it is through place markers that the novel’s chapters are organized. Yet it is equally clear that Nazneen’s memory of the place merges with the memory of a particular sociality imagined as distinctly South Asian. Perhaps as evidence of its own hybridity, Ali’s fiction about Bangladesh oscillates between the migrant’s stereotypical nostalgia for a place of family and familiarity and the no less stereotypical Western portrait of chaos, overcrowding, and cruel desperation. By virtue of its own inability to validate either representation of Bangladesh, the text compels its readers to call into question the veracity of either stereotype. In an interesting if puzzling narrative choice, Ali intercepts Nazneen’s development with a series of letters from her sister Hasina that span the thirteen years between Raqib’s death in 1988 and the present moment of the novel in 2001. By literally taking over the story, Hasina’s letters force a reckoning with the possibility of another life in Bangladesh. While letters from Hasina pepper the story throughout, they provide the entire content of this period in the novel when Nazneen is mourning her son’s loss. Spanning twenty-five pages, the letters are written in bizarrely broken English. Even semantically, Hasina’s letters have a disruptive and destabilizing quality. It is unclear whether they serve to signify Hasina’s illiteracy in Bengali or her scribe’s limited fluency in English. Compounded by the fact that Nazneen cannot read English, the letters signal an impossibility of representing Bangladesh, as both Nazneen and her sister might experience it, to an Anglophone audience. Further, their tortured language draws attention to the commonplace stereotypes that designate Bangladesh as an illegible and incoherent location within the English global novel. Numerous critics of the novel have puzzled over the significance of Hasina’s cryptic missives. Alistair Cormack argues that the letters deliberately confound our ability to read Hasina, Bangladesh, and Nazneen in clear and direct ways. Michela Canepari-Labib, as Michael Perfect notes, makes the case that the idiomatic awkwardness of the letters represent a tick in the novel’s attempt at verisimilitude for Bangladesh and for the postcolonial subjects whose integration to the West the novel contemplates. Finally, Jane Hiddleston sees them as a “literary device” employed by Ali to focus our attention on how any representation

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of South Asia within an Anglophone novel remains perforce mediated, calling attention primarily to the complex difficulties that must be faced in making cultural difference meaningful to an audience accustomed to viewing it as a stereotype for otherness: Ali’s text can be read . . . as a forum where myths circulating around both cultures are exposed in order to provoke the reader. The stock images of Hasina’s letters are themselves testimony to the pervasiveness of such stereotypes in Bangladesh as well as in Britain, and their inclusion in a novel such as this forces us to consider the difficulty of attempting to free any representation of cultural identity from their influence.

In short, Hasina’s letters solidify and query the stereotype of Bangladesh within the global imaginary as a place in which consciousness is absolutely beyond representation. The substance of the letters themselves draws attention to the difficulty of translating subaltern life in Bangladesh within the protocols of an English novel. This life, for the most part, is stereotypically harrowing and seemingly beyond linguistic capture. Hasina, for example, describes in cryptic detail her friend Monju’s violent assault by her husband: “I tell you about friend Monju. Acid melt cheekbone and nose and one eye. Other eye damage only with pain and very hate. Difficult thing how I make you describe?” As Perfect notes, such moments formally point to the impossibility of rendering Bangladesh in a coherent manner within the novel. Hasina’s question, “how I make you describe?,” calls forth the linguistic and relational confusion that situates Bangladesh’s alterity to London and Englishness. It is telling that despite the broken dialect of her language, Hasina’s interventions reify Bangladesh as a stereotypic place of danger and vulnerability by invoking its contrast from England. Her descriptions of lawless looting and threats of bodily violence rely rhetorically on escapist fantasies that counterpose England to Bangladesh: “Sister what is happen to police and court and thing? In England could such thing happen like this?” and “‘This country,’ she say very sad. ‘I always dreamed of leaving.’” Hasina’s Bangladesh is thus stereotypically coded beyond civility, security, or fluency, even as England is imagined as its antithesis, as a place of possibility. Even more significantly, the only time Hasina

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writes in a startlingly plain manner is when she proclaims the erasure of her own subjective existence: “I am a low woman,” she announces in one letter, suddenly sounding clear, “I am nothing. I have nothing. I am all that I have. I can give you nothing.” This exceptional declaration—one that stands out, as Perfect astutely notes, because of its “grammatically flawless idiom”—signifies that Bangladesh and, indeed, the subaltern woman’s subjective knowledge of it can exist only as a point of complete negation within this novel. In other words, in a novel about South Asian migrants to the West, Bangladesh exists as an overdetermined stereotype, now full of every trope of decline and at other times simply empty of signification altogether. In so doing, the stereotypes of Bangladesh that Ali conjures reveal little about Hasina herself as a subaltern of the global south. Instead they draw attention to an aporia (of place and language) through which the migrant life story of her diasporic counterpart, Nazneen, is made legible within the novel. To the extent that Brick Lane orients us to the stereotypical conceptions we have of the migrant subaltern’s entry into metropolitan life, it does so by projecting this life as a response to the cryptic and harrowing calls from another continent. As we stammer through Hasina’s painful attempts at self-representation, we stumble and fall in our attempts to read her: “Sister I have many thing to tell. New address in Narayanganj. Job in new factory I am machinist real woman job now.” Portraying the brutality of Hasina’s life in broken prose, the narrative takes us through the dramatic details of Hasina’s various jobs, relationships, migrations, and daily struggles. The section closes with Hasina in a new position as a domestic servant where “nothing here for making scared of. Mistress is kind. Mister is kind. They give plenty of food. If you are in same address now you write to me again.” Calling attention to the ways in which, for both sisters, things always seem to stay the same more than they change, Hasina’s letter confirms the stasis of Nazneen’s life in her flat. Ironically, however, the larger narrative suggests that Nazneen’s journey in the flat has taken place on a different level from Hasina’s literal movements across Bangladesh and across Dhaka. If Hasina’s journey is propelled by material lack that is hardly met, Nazneen’s is a spiritual, mental, and material journey toward a freedom that is equally unconvincingly idealized. While Hasina’s letters tell of her movement, Nazneen’s narrative tells of her development. The

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letters draw a contrast between Nazneen’s ascension and Hasina’s tribulations, but they also reveal a similar trajectory for both women in terms of their pursuit of independence. Although Hasina’s struggle for material survival is more pressing, she too supposedly finds her way toward an unstable independence, as her sister does toward an uncertain and overly idealized freedom. In her portrayal of London, Ali works within the familiar paradigm of the West as a place for self-exploration yet lacking in sociality and warmth. In contrast to the village in Bangladesh, London is less regulated by fate. Although Nazneen’s life is absent of any social intimacy, her loneliness in London catalyzes her desire for social assimilation. Absent the constant distractions of the village, London forces Nazneen toward introspection and eventually toward work and action. Trapped in her flat, for instance, Nazneen becomes visually captivated with “the tattoo lady,” who sits on her balcony across from Nazneen’s flat, perpetually smoking. Although Nazneen has never spoken to the tattoo lady, she becomes part of Nazneen’s imagined community as she fantasizes a friendship with this proximal yet culturally remote figure. The possibility of making contact with the tattoo lady dissolves when Nazneen admits to herself that she “could say [only] two things in English: sorry and thank you.” In sharp contrast to the teeming sociality of the village, language fluency impedes social mingling between residents of the council flats. Just as Nazneen’s experience of the village is located in her memory, her acquaintance with the tattoo lady is relegated to her imagination. Any possibility of material interaction in either instance is foreclosed by the limits of time and distance, on the one hand, and linguistic barriers, on the other. Yet Nazneen’s contemplation and desire to know the tattoo lady is suggestive of the potential for cross-cultural exchange that, though not realized, creates the conditions of possibility for Nazneen’s adaptation to her new life in Brick Lane. The racial, cultural, and linguistic divisions that stop Nazneen from acting on impulse fail to stifle her fantasy. What the tattoo lady provides for Nazneen is the means through which she comes to imagine an alternative to her present moment. Although she knows that she would “spend another day alone,” within the realm of fantasy she has become able to imagine sharing “samosas or bhajis” with this strange figure. From her early experiences at the beginning of the novel, to the point of Chanu’s departure and Nazneen’s independence at the end,

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the text is organized through the characters’ relationships to their locations, the places in which they find themselves. Each section of the novel announces the place and date at which it occurs, and the narrative is for the most part chronological, although it shifts in geographical location between London and Dhaka. In a sense, the novel is largely about Nazneen’s journey from Bangladesh to Brick Lane, but the travel in physical space and time is accompanied by a corresponding movement in fantasy and imagination. If the text unfolds around an uncritical adaptation of stereotypes that define and give meaning to particular places, Nazneen begins to complicate these stereotypes by imagining an alternative possibility at the junction of fantasy and reality. The novel seems to fleetingly suggest that the traversal of physical space sometimes enables other more significant boundary crossings as well. However, Nazneen’s imaginative escapes, her fantasies of being in places other than where she is, as John Marx notes, “falls short of the threshold for calculative agency” for the migrant subject. The alternative she is able to imagine for herself remains conscribed to the labor she performs at home. As Ali makes clear, Nazneen’s work within the home space is conditioned by Chanu’s convictions. He tells their daughters, “Your mother is doing everything possible to facilitate our dream through the age old and honorable craft of tailoring.” Aside from reaffirming Chanu’s desire to return to their real homeland, Nazneen’s previously reproductive domestic space is reconceived in terms of the debilitating rhythms of her new work. Ali gives us scenes of the new confinement she endures at home: [Chanu] ripped the thin sheath of plastic and unfurled the legs of a dozen or so pairs of men’s trousers. “Hemming,” he announced.  .  .  . “Test batch.” . . . “All will be inspected.” . . . Chanu brought home holdalls of buttonless shirts, carrier bags of unlined dresses, a washing tub full of catchless bras. He counted them out. He counted them back in. Every couple of days he went for new loads. He performed a kind of rudimentary quality control.

That such rigors of domestic labor are at the heart of Nazneen’s newfound sense of “freedom” speaks to Ali’s cautions about the biocultural

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nexus that continues to frame her. Whatever sense of “agency” Nazneen arrives at, it will most likely be exercised only within an economy of transnational labor with equally restricted biocultural presumptions. Her realization that “work in itself, performed with a desire for perfection, was capable of giving satisfaction” arises insofar as she fulfills the desires of Chanu and Karim, the middlemen who dictate the terms of her work. Notably, it is her ability to work that confirms their ideas of her as a woman. “When I married her, I said: She is a good worker,” says Chanu, and for Karim, she is transformed into “the Real thing,” his idea of an authentic woman from the homeland. In effect, domestic garment work feminizes her in a new economy and within a new stereotype of domestic work as the only available form of integration for workingclass migrants. Her final assertion of choice, “I will decide what to do. . . . I will say what happens to me. I will be the one,” hints at the possibility of escaping the ways in which others “make [her] up” and fixate on her as a stereotype. Yet the novel never confirms this transition, relegating it to the realm of Nazneen’s dreams. The climax of the novel is the scene of the riot. Disoriented by chaos on Brick Lane, Ali portrays Nazneen’s stasis: “Nazneen stopped moving . . . during this sinister game of hide-and-seek. There were no white people here at all. These boys were fighting themselves. A dizziness came over her and she leaned against the glass. How long, she thought, how long it has taken me to get this far.” When Nazneen thinks to herself “how long it has taken me to get this far,” it is uncertain whether she is referring to her movement from the house to the streets of Brick Lane, or her passage from Bangladesh to England, or her journey from the home into the world, or her transformation from one kind of domestic worker to another. Even more striking is that Ali presents the failure of British multiculturalism to adequately extend the sense of secure belonging to places like Brick Lane as a “brown” or “black” problem. The biocultural rhetoric of assimilation that governs British national discourse appears to be fully integrated into the structure of the riot that we are told implodes as much from the divisiveness within the migrant community as from the catalysts without. Nazneen’s ability to perceive herself in the midst of such a community of difference whose presence in London remains internally and externally contested is the journey of migrancy that unfolds in Brick Lane.

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Shortly after this moment, Nazneen gathers the courage to tell Chanu that when he leaves for Bangladesh, she and the girls will stay behind in England: “I can’t go with you,” she says, to which Chanu replies, “I can’t stay.” The metaphor of travel that has structured the movement of the novel takes on a new relationship to Nazneen’s assimilationist hopes and Chanu’s uncompromisingly separatist views. In a moment of shared parting, both Nazneen and Chanu embark on a different journey that could only have been shaped by their time together in Brick Lane. Rejecting the neat resolution of a shared future, Nazneen and Chanu opt instead for their isolated realities. Blending the scene of physical departure with the suggestion of more significant psychic movements, the narrative comes to a close with the blurring of arrivals and departures. It is possible to read this separation as reaffirming a stereotypic alliance between the space of the West and the developmental story of an emergent migrant subject, both modern and autonomous. For Nazneen, however, this is a predetermined itinerary from fate to free will that removes none of the shackles of her work as an unskilled, illiterate worker within a transnational frame. Razia’s proclamation, “This is England. . . . You can do whatever you like,” would seem to solidify a reading of first world independence where Nazneen’s liberation is geographically and temporally bounded by the specificity of the English nation. But it is also possible to read the ending as an instance of deferral. The novel’s utopian end suggests that it is deeply escapist. Throughout the novel, memories of Hasina haunt Nazneen. By the end of her journey, however, Nazneen’s affective ties seem resituated around a new relationship with Razia, one not based in blood and open to invention and play. If the ties that bind the citizens to the state are stereotypically invented genealogies of race and blood, the moment of sociality at the end of the novel makes way for new modes of affection beyond the limits of kinship. Nazneen’s relationship with Razia in a sense replaces her ties not only to Hasina but also to both Chanu and Karim. Rather than choosing to move between marriages to Chanu and then Karim, Nazneen chooses instead to join Razia in her business venture, her own clothing design company. The possibility that Razia holds out to Nazneen may be one of assimilation, but equally, it is one of an alternative sociality to the normative biocultural ways of belonging to either Brick Lane or the British state. The novel, however, can merely gesture toward such an alternative

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Figure . Film still from Brick Lane (dir. Sarah Gavron). Nazneen and her two daughters make snow angels after Chanu’s departure to Bangladesh. The film reinstates the primacy of the genealogical family by removing Razia from the ending depicted in the novel.

within a cautious frame of escape. At its core, then, Brick Lane is as much about the politics of fantasy as it is about the relations of materiality. Interestingly, however, the film ends on a different note, leaving Razia out and instead recasting Nazneen as the optimistic mother of her two daughters (figure 5.2). If Nazneen’s future as a woman and migrant remains uncertain in terms of her self-determined entry into Britain’s work force, the novel also obscures the futures of other translated figures in suggestive ways. Hasina stops writing to her sister for unexplained reasons and, together with her letters, mysteriously vanishes from the novel. Chanu, the very stereotype of aspirational migrancy, returns to Bangladesh with renewed hopes of making a success of his business ventures. He too simply disappears from the story. The most tantalizing figure whose fate remains suspended is Karim, Nazneen’s illicit lover and the one-time leader of the radical Bengal Tigers, the group invested in asserting migrant rights and refuting the feckless white supremacists who range over Brick Lane as the Lion Hearts. Having broken her ties to Karim, Nazneen learns of his expatriation to Bangladesh (a place he has never been) after riots between the two factions come to an uneasy stalemate. Nazneen’s casual encounter with one of Karim’s boys yields this exchange:

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“Do you know,” she asked him, “what happened to the Bengal Tigers?” . . . “It was disbanded. The chairman went away.” “Oh,” said Nazneen, looking down. “Where did he go?” “Karim? He went to Bangladesh. . . . Or he joined the caravan. That’s what some people say.” Nazneen had a vision: Karim in his jeans and white shirt, . . . a bale of dresses over his shoulder; Karim in a mountain cave, surrounded by men in turbans wielding machine guns.  .  .  . “Anyway,” said the boy, “I wouldn’t go to jihad in some faraway place. There’s enough to do here.”

Ali offers a vision of second-generation South Asian migrants that enlarges the scope of stereotypes about migrants. Aside from the questionable politics of assimilation that attach to Bangladeshis in Brick Lane, the specter of Karim’s exile as a jihadi returns us to thinking of Bangladesh as the site of a returned or repatriated diaspora, one that is formed as a consequence of the agitation over terror and cheap labor in the West. Known for farming out garment work to the women in his community and for fomenting homegrown fundamentalism in the West, Karim’s future seems imaginable, however absurdly, when located in this novel’s fiction about Bangladesh. Drawing on Fanon’s path-breaking thought on national consciousness, Homi Bhabha has argued that nations are constituted mainly as narratives when the “international dimension both within the margins of the nation-space and in the boundaries in-between nations and peoples . . . becomes the crossroads to a new transnational culture.” Karim’s return signals the vortex of such a transnationalism of stereotypes about South Asia. With a “bale of dresses over his shoulder” but also a figure lurking in a “cave” with “turbaned” men “wielding machine guns,” Karim becomes a simultaneous cipher for transnational labor and terror. The irony of this moment that reinforces the ubiquity of these stereotypes for the global imaginary is that it is Nazneen, herself on the fringes of liberal culture in Britain, who should envision her former ally in this light. The association of South Asia with terror and the coerciveness of outsourced labor arise alongside the notion that these stereotypes are of necessity mobile. Crisscrossing international borders, they test unitary myths of national origins and gesture instead to the stereotype’s transnational currencies. “Nations,” Bhabha argues along lines made famous

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by Benedict Anderson, “like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye.” In other words, nations routinely outsize their political borders in a kind of carryover that can only be fashioned through narrative. As my next chapter on outsourcing and terror shows, when national narratives collide with such stereotypes, they radically suture new ways of understanding transnational culture. In his analysis Bhabha suggests that the unstable alignment between “the nation’s coming into being,” its “cultural significations” and “social life” makes its narratives “ambivalent.” Stereotypes of work and terror, as I show in this book’s conclusion, traffic in this ambivalence in an exaggerated manner that disrupts any clear separation in how we may perceive distinctions between national and transnational cultures in South Asia. In this chapter, I have shown how stereotypes within Ali’s novel and in the politics surrounding it serve to ultimately mediate both the ways in which the West is able to imagine itself and in how Nazneen is able to imagine her life in London. Indeed, the media furor over the stereotypes in Brick Lane with which I began this chapter have tended to generate competing interpretations of the value of this novel itself. “A media debate,” Perfect observes, “which has described the novel either as accurately representing or as grossly commodifying cultural otherness, those who champion it have not sought to deny that it employs stereotypes but rather to emphasize its sense of knowing irony in doing so.” The salience of this remark is not whether the novel produces good or bad stereotypes so much as the undecidable, even probing status of stereotypes about the South Asian diaspora in Brick Lane. Most importantly, then, it may be supposed that the stereotypes Brick Lane proffers are a provocation to Anglophone readers interested in thinking about their relationship with postcolonial others in their midst, and are at times a provocation to their own claims as migrants to the West from locations previously colonized by it. Among the dilemmas that these stereotypes ask that we confront are ones about the limited scope of freedoms we extend migrants from the global south, and about the compound of vexed assumptions—racial, biological, and cultural—with which we routinely view places, languages, and subjectivities we consider distant but that, as this novel shows, are actually proximal, even intimately so, to us. Rather than merely cataloging the various stereotypes at play in Ali’s narrative, I hope to have shown

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that in Ali’s hands and, by extension, for her reading public, each stereotype becomes a narrative device that undoes the totalizing capacity of the stereotype at large to capture and represent the biocultural world of the migrant. In other words, working against the grain of any particular stereotype, the stereotype at large enables Ali to imagine migrant life as a series of alternatives to any given narrative that may seek to contain its myriad complexities. Far from remaining peripheral to the narrative, the network of stereotypes that punctuate the novel serve as the very conditions of possibility for Ali’s representation of South Asian migrant life, materially and imaginatively.

6 GOOD AND BAD TRANSNATIONALISMS? OUTSOURCING AND TERROR

The evening of December 28, 2005, was the scene of chaos at the Indian Institute of Science, one of India’s preeminent colleges. A gunman with an AK-56 firearm manufactured in China had infiltrated a technology conference and opened fire on attendees. The perpetrator absconded, but not before killing a well-regarded professor of mathematics and wounding four others. Immediately after this incident, the Indian government escalated the terror alert level across the nation. There was considerable speculation that “international” terrorists linked to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were responsible for this violence. Eventually six suspects were arrested and convicted to life sentences for providing “logistical support” for terror and conspiring to “wage a war against the nation.” It was never clear who the main actor was, and he was never apprehended. Reporting on this incident for Time magazine, Aravind Adiga, the future author of The White Tiger, asks “is outsourcing the next terror target?” He points out the thorny issue that this event highlights in terms of national security: “The attack,” Adiga writes, “is likely to shift attention within India to the question of how well prepared the country’s outsourcing centers are for terror strikes.” Adiga’s query anticipates the ease with which concerns over terror and outsourcing slide into one another in stereotypes of South Asia. Commonplace to anxieties evinced by state organizations over whether and how terrorism

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is proliferating around the globe is the idea that terror itself may be outsourced and privatized across state borders, just as state-sanctioned security contracts for war zones are. Conversely, the notion that outsourcing itself is a form of economic coercion with transnational reach mires ethical worries about labor exploitation in the language of fear and violence that encapsulates terror. Yet the differences between terrorism and outsourcing remain stark. While the former is aligned with destructive, affect-driven action by nonstate, nonconformist actors motivated by rage or revenge, the latter is viewed as the productive work of compliant citizens. If terror erupts against the dominative forms of corporate and finance globalization, outsourcing is often seen as its ameliorative counterpart. Hence, on President Obama’s visit to India in 2010, his address to the parliament included calling on Pakistan to bring terrorists (of the 2008 Mumbai attacks) to heel while extending his support for India’s inclusion as a permanent member of the UN security council. His remarks were backed by the renewal of strategic trade alliances between India and the United States totaling upward of $10 billion and the much-touted creation of fifty thousand jobs. Notably, at a time when the economy in the United States was feeble and Obama’s rhetoric on the domestic front was awash with calls for “in-sourcing,” his diplomatic vision for South Asia turned on quashing the real threat of terrorism while dispelling “stereotypes that have outlived their usefulness” with respect to the transnationalization of labor. Seeing work and terrorism as a routine and intimately linked part of the social landscape of South Asia is not new. It is, for example, echoed in the tripartite foreign policy approach that Hilary Clinton advocated for the West, urging that the 3D model of “defense, diplomacy, and development” be adopted together in global affairs. At the start of her tenure as secretary of state, in a speech given before the Center for Global Development in Washington, Clinton made a case for development ventures by suggesting that they were an antidote to terror. “We cannot stop terrorism or defeat the ideologies of violent extremism when hundreds of millions of young people see a future with no jobs, no hope, and no way ever to catch up to the developed world,” Clinton said. In a similar vein, others such as Maha Hosain Aziz, who teaches politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, urges that we “explore” the ties

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between unemployment and militancy because in Pakistan, “terror can be fought by creating jobs.” In short, the political discourse of terrorism in the West is enmeshed within an economic one of developmentalism. Work—useful, creative, and corporate—is supposed as dialectically connected to its other, terror. In this closing chapter, I consider the contemporary aggregates of the stereotypes about South Asia with which the book begins. The story of India’s decolonization as it was globally transmitted extends paradoxical ideas about South Asia’s fight for freedom. Freedom—elaborated in the Gandhian struggle as the nonviolent embrace of core demands for human liberty, equality, legal rights, and democratic representation— highlighted the absence of these Enlightenment ideals in colonial civic life. The end of colonialism is thus routinely celebrated as the beginning of autonomy and self-representation for the whole region. The actual moments of political freedom arrived at after centuries of colonial rule, however, were fiercely contested and mired in the horrific communal violence of Partition. This violence has been continually reanimated on other occasions, such as in the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971, the Emergency internal to India in 1975, the ongoing militarization and unrest in Kashmir, the communal eruptions over Babri Masjid and in Gujarat, the Gurkha movement in the Northeast, the Tamil separatist movement in the South, and more lately in various terroristic insurgencies. These episodes of political violence, when exposed through global media on a world stage, compete against notions originating in financial corridors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank that South Asia is the best example of development as freedom. A recent World Bank report, for example, celebrates the possibility of single-digit poverty rates in the area by 2015 as a consequence of more open trade while an IMF report extols the “spillover effect” of India’s unexpected economic growth rates. In short, the temperature of what freedom has meant and how it is manifest in the region has been a vastly fluctuating one. As Midnight’s Children shows, fictions about South Asia’s emergence as a free society are haunted by these split and unresolved legacies. How freedom is manifest in the postcolony remains an open question that can only be represented through contradictory, even ironic turns. Especially in the Anglophone context, fictional representations of South Asia

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grapple with the uncertain temper of liberal freedoms by playing with stereotypes. Thus, stereotypes of multitudes, slums, civil war, and migrancy vacillate unpredictably. They translate liberal desires for progress and global ascendance (in the reader, for the nation), but they do so by illustrating their uneven, stifling, and doubtful effects for former colonies. In so doing, stereotypes call forth cultural and civilizational rifts while inviting their reexamination. Real and fabulated stereotypes in global novels “provincialize” Westernized sensibilities in the sense meant by Dipesh Chakrabarty. They cast “Europe” and “India,” or the West and its Other more generally, as “hyperreal terms in that they refer to certain figures of imagination whose referents remain somewhat indeterminate.” When these categories are overly “reified,” they remain juxtaposed in relations of “domination and subordination,” pitting the sensibilities of one world against the other. However, to the extent that they are revealed as fabricated, as stereotypes are, they also carry the possibility for signifying these relations anew or even possibly arranging them otherwise to what they are. This chapter examines two of the most conspicuous figurations about South Asia that have recently enthralled the global imaginary—namely, that of terrorism and cyber coolies. It is not my intension to evaluate the historical formations of either. Rather, I wish to think about the cosmopolitics of their appearance in contemporary transnational literatures about South Asia. As stereotypes, terror and work present competing accounts of how we relate to the extension of transnationalism as a cultural and economic phenomenon. They steady very different narratives about the global reaches of certain types of coercion as the exercise of free will. However, these stereotypes also share a trope of spectacular impersonation whereby both terrorism and invisible forms of work actually become readable or recognizable within a text. These textual moments of self-conscious cultural impersonation linked to terror and labor alike cohere in stereotypical portraits that are fully readable only when we enter into the scene as readers. Beyond this, fictional stereotypes of terror and outsourced labor invoke a speculative, uncertain orientation in depicting the postcolonial. While each stereotype offers a certain test for how we see freedom, as allied with or against extensions of capital in the world, it also refashions our mimetic relation to world and text. A novel, such as Mohsin

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Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, that turns on stereotypes of terror transforms the stereotype itself. In the process it also reforms our expectations of the form and genre of the transnational novel. In other words, stereotypes in global fiction are perfect mimetic ciphers; they imitate a type that is immediately recognizable to us as readers while simultaneously opening the text to the process of mirroring and substitution intrinsic to mimesis. This process, which in fact depends on a kind of reading practice—a deep engagement with the text’s allegory and affect—asks that readers insert themselves into the object of study in order to interpret it. I will return to this question of mimesis as a way of thinking about stereotyping, its relation to the real, and the genre of the Anglophone global novel in closing. For the moment, let us turn to a brief examination of two novels, Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at the Call Center, to sharpen some of these complex claims. TERRORISM, IMPERSONATION, MIMICRY

It is easy to see why most literary accounts that deal with The Reluctant Fundamentalist characterize it as a “post-9/11 novel.” The novel represents the moment of the terror attacks in which planes crash into the World Trade Center towers as a catalytic one that radically alters the fortunes and outlook of the protagonist, Changez. An immigrant from Pakistan, Changez until then is an optimistic Princeton graduate whose star as a corporate consultant is on the rise. The events of 9/11 intervene to change all of it. On a business trip to Manila, Changez is alone in his hotel room as he sees the scene unfold on television: The following evening was supposed to be our last in Manila. I was in my room, packing my things. I turned on the television and saw what at first I took to be a film. But as I continued to watch, I realized that it was not fiction but news. I stared as one—and then the other—of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled.

This narrative moment adroitly condenses the view of terror that emerged after 9/11 as the most fantastic of spectacles, or the actualization in real

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life of an absurd filmic simulacrum. The catastrophic event that occurs in New York is only accessible to the protagonist as a spectacular filmic relay, one whose veracity is in doubt at first glimpse. Removed from its location, his direct experience of it mediated by television, Changez’s “smile” unmasks him. He instantly becomes the very subject referenced in the novel’s title, “a reluctant fundamentalist,” a terrorist sympathizer. His slightly delayed affective reflex to seeing the towers collapse is to “smile” and confess that, however “despicable it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.” By disclosing his pleasure at the sight of terroristic violence, the novel collapses distinctions between Changez—the well-acculturated immigrant to America—and the terrorists, who are stereotypically regarded as anti-American. Changez is not the agent of violence on this occasion, but neither is he seemingly appropriately affected by terror. As a result, from this point on he holds a suspect position, one whose scrutiny propels the story forward. Neither terrorist nor grieving victim, Changez occupies an uneasy middle ground in which the paranoid possibility that terrorists may be Westernized liberal subjects lurking undiscernibly among us becomes viable. This is certainly one stereotype of the terrorists that the novel plays on. Following his admission that he “was pleased at the slaughter of thousands of innocents,” Changez’s deft masquerade of his emotions in front of his coworkers (“I knew merely that my feelings would be unacceptable to my colleagues, and I undertook to hide them as well as I could”), brings up the uncanny doubling of authenticity and masquerade that typifies the immigrant identity. This is yet another stereotype the novel marks. Changez as affluent corporate citizen is self-admittedly a “product” of America even as his is a constantly contrived impersonation of the model migrant stereotype. In this respect, Changez typifies the figure of the postcolonial mimic whose antecedent Homi Bhabha locates in colonial culture. We may recall that, for Bhabha, mimicry is always an ambivalent posture “stricken by an indeterminacy” that instigates “surveillance” and at the same time escapes it. Which is to say, the figure of the colonial mimic is both the object of scrutiny and the subject that so readily produces “its excess, its difference” that it eludes any fixity of identity or essence. It is this continual “slippage” where mimicry is seen as an expression of dominant or normalized social scripts in keeping with prevalent

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stereotypes and the mimic’s capacity to reflect “the sign of the inappropriate” that makes its presence in culture so difficult to read. Because mimicry uncertainly expresses conformity as well as recalcitrance to colonialist cultural norms, simultaneously coding twin signs of subservience to imposed cultural forms and “menacing” or “mocking” them, it is a practice that is exceptionally transcultural. As transcultural performance, mimicry occurs directly in the interstices between cultures. These cultural codes are often militantly adversarial to one another, making cultural mimicry a particularly shadowy and difficult text to read. As Bhabha puts it, mimicry is “a discourse at the crossroads of what is known and permissible and that which though known must be kept concealed” because it always also addresses “a problem of authority.” The fact that Changez occupies the seams between highly differentiated cultural dispositions—being American or Pakistani, assimilative immigrant or belligerent one, corporate collaborator or terrorist bespoiler—underscores why he is so ideally readable as a contemporary mimic man. However, his status as a figure limning ostensibly separated cultural terrains highlights the manner in which the novel casts him as a cipher that needs to be continually read. Whether for or against the grain of a stereotype, reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist requires that Anglophone readers read, affirm, and then reread and reassess Changez in their relation to him. Changez’s capacity for mimicry encapsulates the most powerful dimension of mimicry that Bhabha theorizes. Mimicry, for Bhabha, is ultimately a performative text that must be closely read. It plays on the desire to see (it is “the subject of the scopic drive”) at the same time as mimicking this or that cultural posture or habit defies ready visibility because of its “partial” nature. Mimicry thereby demands that it be read or scrutinized ever more carefully as the “site of interdiction.” Alternatively put, mimicry is mimesis gone awry because it is the site of a palimpsestic inscription of culture, layered one over many to reflect the artifice of cultural forms themselves: “What emerges between mimesis and mimicry,” Bhabha asserts, “is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable.” As a text with almost no content because it is always so excessively inscribed, the inclusion of cultural mimicry in a transnational

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novel is particularly suited to the dynamics of reiteration, reproducibility, and difference that govern stereotyping. TERROR AS SPECTACLE, ALLEGORY, AFFECT

Returning to our discussion of terror as a stereotype, casting Changez in the role of a cultural impersonator opens the stereotype itself to interrogation. The spectacle of the attack that appears on television is juxtaposed to Changez’s flitting and unfitting emotions. These expressions of Changez’s feelings, which appear spontaneous, are nevertheless also fickle because they are easily disguised. The dissonance between scene and affect disrupts typical ways in which the sentience of terrorism is usually manifest publicly. Reflecting on the dialectics of disaster that 9/11 produced, Jameson probes the profusion of certain affective responses— of grief, empathy, and pity—that makes the catharsis of nationalism seem the only natural response to terror. Jameson writes: I think it is instructive to step away for a moment and to deny that it is natural and self-explanatory for masses of people to be devastated by catastrophe in which they have lost no one they know, in a place to which they have no particular connections. Is nationality really so natural a function of human or even social being? Even more than that, is pity or sympathy really so innate a feature of the human condition?

The uncertain affective response that attaches to Changez raises these questions sharply. As in Ondaatje’s case that I examined in chapter four, Changez’s insensitivity also asks that we grapple with questions about the reach and relationality of others’ deaths. But more than this, the novel compels us to ponder, as does Jameson, the limits of how far terrorism may be represented as a universal experience. Changez’s confession that he “smiled” at the sight on the television suggests that the kind of nationalistic fervor that cohered the stereotype of terror and terrorism after 9/11 may well be “a media affirmation of collective unanimity” that authenticates “a vast tidal wave of identical reactions” that in fact never existed. Deeply embedded in the discourse of terror that followed from 9/11 is its knotty relation to spectacle. One could say that in the millennium,

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terrorism’s most dominant stereotype is the spectacular projection of the terrorist act. If, following Guy Debord, we think of modernity as a form of spectacle life where spectacles, more than “a collection of images,” are “social relation(s) between people . . . mediated by images,” it is worth noting that terrorism’s spectacularity directly reflects its ties to late capitalist culture. The society of the spectacle, as Debord so provocatively argued, arrives when “capital accumulate[s] to the point of images.” To the extent that terror’s main expression is its visibility, it also signals its overriding commoditization in culture. Spectacles of terror attain stereotypic currency because, like stereotypes, they profoundly expose the fetishistic aspects of commodity culture. The spectacular reveals itself as a commodified cultural form in Debord’s scheme because it sutures together the “intangible as well as tangible things” intrinsic to the fetishistic consumption of commodities. The spectacle and stereotype operate by similarly attaching themselves to values that appear both real and fantastic, material and metaphysical. The idea that terrorism as a stereotype is best represented as spectacle furthers certain assumptions about its core nature. It suggests that terrorism is in some measure an innate aspect of contemporary consumer culture. It also suggests that terror made visible is a sign of the real insofar as it produces reality for those condemned to passively encountering it. Lastly, it confirms that terror makes itself known by being highly visible; that its affective afterlife is conditioned by how we see (rather than relate to, feel, or experience) it. In discussions of terror after 9/11, these attributes of terrorism are routinely invoked. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, compares the specter of the towers falling to their cinematic precursors, arguing that 9/11 points to the “dematerialization of ‘real’ life itself ” because it is firstly a “spectral show.” Terrorism must be conceptualized, he argues, as the “dessert of the real” wherein the reality itself is made raw, exposing “the ideological and fantasmatic coordinates that determine its perception.” Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe conceive of terror as a “performance art” that not only reflects on what reality is but also “communicates the real itself ” by thrusting it bodily and materially onto the senses of viewers. “Consider the big event,” Lentricchia and McAuliffe write, “an elaborate spectacle requiring advanced technology. A theater of images . . . a theater on behalf of perception—not text or story.” In this account, the text of terror representing violent dissension is replaced by its spectacular

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theatricality, as if the specter itself confirms its meaning rather than the need to interpret it. Even more controversially, Jean Baudrillard distills terror as a purely symbolic act against power that is always in excess of meanings and interpretations that may attach to it. “We try retrospectively to impose some kind of meaning on it,” Baudrillard asserts, “to find some kind of interpretation. But there is none. And it is in the radicality of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle, which alone is original and irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us.” Yet spectacles, even terroristic ones, move us in different ways. Their affective designs are contingent and not always discerned if we go no further than to think of terror as a specter that sunders narrative. By resurrecting the spectacle of terror but pointing to its incongruent effect on Changez, Hamid redirects our attention to how the stereotype that attaches to it remains unruly. Aside from a spectacular assault, terror, as Gayatri Spivak reminds, us “is, of course, also the name of an affect.” This affective register of terror is what novels that engage its stereotype pry loose and ask that we interpretively enter. The pedantic physician Henry Perowne’s nervous unease and gradual loss of conviction at having possibly witnessed a terror attack from the safety of his luxurious London home in Ian McEwan’s Saturday; the obsessive surveillance of the skyline by a group of children paranoid about a repeat terror attack in Don DeLillo’s The Falling Man; the transformation of the demure Shalimar from clown and tightrope walker to raging, plotting international man of terror in Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown: these are a few instances in which the effects of terror as spectacle may be known only by entering into its story. The story of terror that The Reluctant Fundamentalist unveils, its affective significations as well as its intransigence to narrative synthesis, unfolds in the immediate aftermath of the spectacular event of 9/11. Changez’s awareness that he is “caught up in the symbolism of it all” brushes against the contrariness of his reactions—his obvious experience of pleasure at the collapse of the towers, his desire to “feign” the “same shock and anguish” as his American colleagues, but also his nagging worry for his girlfriend, Erica, and the other victims of the event in New York, the city he regards as home. The stereotype of terror as spectacle, the novel suggests, may be incommensurable with how we

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understand the subjective affects and experiential world of the terrorist. On his return to New York, Changez, whose conflicted response to 9/11 the novel has exposed, becomes intensely aware of its inappropriateness: “New York was in mourning,” he observes, and “shrines to the dead and missing  .  .  . had sprung up in my absence.  .  .  . They reminded me of my own uncharitable—indeed inhumane—response to the tragedy, and I felt from them a constant murmur of reproach.” The novel asks that we consider the distance between this expression of remorse for having felt unsound feelings, the intimate geography of loss and memorialization, and the desire and direction of reproach and retribution that terror as spectacle produces. If terrorism is stereotyped through visibility, how do we discern the terrorist type? In other words, what makes a terrorist? Is there a line between being human and being inhumane that terrorists necessarily cross? Under what conditions might these be perceptible in the accounts we give of our worlding? With regard to Changez, these are the questions that Hamid deliberately leaves unresolved for readers to decide. The novel’s focus on the effects and symptoms of terror for an immigrant from Pakistan already implicates the stereotype of terror it deals with within cultural and social folds. Changez’s affective responses are designed to be read allegorically, as extensions of his cultural circumstance. The Reluctant Fundamentalist makes use of a surplus of allegorical referents to gesture to the ways in which Changez’s particular situation may be read in terms of larger social histories. For instance, Changez works for a valuation firm called Underwood Sampson, an overt allegory for corporatized United States. He is fervently in love with Erica, who happens to be in perpetual mourning for her lost first love, Christopher. Erica as America suggests the resurgence of America’s exceptionalism marred by a debilitating and anemic post-9/11 nostalgia. Taken further, Christopher alludes both to the sense of American newness and discovery associated with the eponymous Columbus as much as to waning yet triumphal forms of religious fervor (especially of the Christian right) that coalesced around forms of national feeling after the attacks. In the midst of all these is Changez, himself a false cognate for “change” as well as a placeholder for stasis. His name, too, reaches back historically to the fierce imperial invasions of Genghis Khan, forcing an excessive identification between his present-day work and prior conquest.

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The allegorical signposts that are everywhere in this novel, as in some other 9/11 novels, have a particular relevance to how the role of terror stereotypes is construed. Allegory is, after all, best understood as an excess of historical traces that through its inexorable slippages, where one narrative sign is always already multiply overdetermined by others, asks us to look ever more anew and askance. Allegory, Walter Benjamin announces, is foremost “a way of seeing” or “a way of looking at things.” The allegories of terrorism that spiral from the novel’s rendering of 9/11 as spectacular crisis thus return us to perspective itself as the governing interpretive question of the work. Like stereotypes, allegories thrive on endless replacements and repetition. In Benjamin’s account, allegory is especially without horizon, capable of endless deflection of sign onto more and more signifiers, because it points ultimately to the collapse of metaphysical and material contemplations of existence, namely of human death and decay. Especially “when . . . history becomes part of the setting,” Benjamin says, it takes on “the script of a ruin.” And “in the ruin,” he adds, “history physically merge[s] into setting.” Terror is one such ruin that merges its script with history and setting. Benjamin of course anticipates as much, writing that “evil as such . . . exists only in allegory, is nothing other than allegory, and means something other than it is. It means in fact precisely the nonexistence of what it presents.” The stakes of reading such pure allegory, looking at its myriad significations, is what the stereotype invites. The representation of terror evacuates the reality of it by pointing instead to the ethical urgency of having its representation read. Beyond the mere aestheticization that terror as spectacle heralds, the polysemic dimensions of terror’s allegories present us with an interpretive task that is both literary and political. The compulsion to see allegorically, we might also remember, is linked by Benjamin variously to an “allegorical attitude,” an “allegorical intention” and an “allegorical intuition.” This is to say, if we are to make something of the relentless play of allegorical allusions through which evil or terror represents itself, it will depend on the limits posed by experience itself. Allegorical reading, which is what stereotypes initiate, is staked on the psychic and sensory investments that guide affect. “Affect” is to an extent another word for the experiential. Whether we see Changez’s migrancy as the cause of the attack, or we see his disaffection as a result of it; whether we link his attitudes to his location in

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Pakistan, or his corporate travels through Manila, Chile, and to gritty neighborhoods of New Jersey; whether we sympathize with his pathological desire for (Am)Erica, or disavow his derision of her depends on how we intuit terror’s affective script—an affective script that, as Spivak suggests, is propelled by a convergence of social, psychic, and group motives. “In the policy-making arena,” Spivak writes, “‘terror’ as social movement and ‘terror’ as affect come together to provide a plausible field for group psychological speculation.” In other words, the penchant to read terror’s affect in one way or another is often marked by speculative differences of culture, race, religion, or other signs of alterity. Stereotypes in some measure hold and expose these faulty lines of separation. One of the most intriguing scenes in The Reluctant Fundamentalist is when Changez and Erica finally consummate their relationship in a country he finds increasingly hostile. By now he has gained her affection as a raconteur whose endless stock of “stories of Pakistan,” his family, and Lahore keep her from descending to the depths of a self-obsessive neurosis. On one occasion, spurred on by his stories, they begin to make love. Erica, however, remains frigid until Changez, driven by his desire for her, asks her to “pretend that I am him [Christopher, her dead boyfriend].” The ensuing scene described by Changez conjoins affect to allegory, invoking stereotype upon stereotype: I do not know how to describe my experience of what happened next; I cannot, of course, claim that I was possessed, but at the same time I did not seem to be myself. It was as if we were under a spell, transported to a world where I was Chris and she was with Chris. . . . The entrance between her legs was wet and dilated, but was at the same time oddly rigid; it reminded me—unwillingly—of a wound, giving our sex a violent undertone.  .  .  . She shuddered towards the end— grievously, almost mortally; her shuddering called forth my own. . . . “You’re a kind person,” she said afterwards, as we lay there. . . . I felt something I have not felt before or since; I remember it well: I felt at once satiated and ashamed.

The novel’s rendering of the spectacle of terror—a stereotype of violence that is easy to read and in which Changez’s reaction stands out as perverse—is replaced with a confluence of allegorical possibilities

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that repeat Changez’s perversity and open it to difference. On the one hand, the form of desire articulated here seems perverse in script. It is recognizable as an assault where the force of possession and the resulting wound takes the form of markedly violent desire. As a civilizational narrative between Pakistan and the United States in a post-9/11 climate, it compounds precisely the kinds of “group psychological speculations” that Spivak aptly suggests terror as affect sparks. Yet there is also affection and tenderness here. Changez expresses a willingness to “play the part,” to be a mimic and reveal himself as one that, in the aftermath of the encounter, is read by Erica as a sign of “kindness.” Her response nevertheless is received by him as “shame.” What to make of this other pivotal scene? What, if anything, to repeat my earlier question, does it reveal about the makings of transnational terror? Or about the affective bearing of a potential terrorist? Does the exposure of Changez’s mimicry—overburdened as it is with muscular cultural stereotypes of triumph, trauma, and shame—clarify a particular narrative about terror’s global circuits? My point, rather simply, is that it does not. That the stereotype of terror remains indeterminate even when allegorical and affectively overextended is its most critical function. Even as it projects the most dominant forms of divisions between group, cultures, and people, it remains cryptic and immediately unknowable. The pleasures, fears, love, and shame—all the affects—that this scene foretells as part of the novel’s story of terror and that attach to individual characters merely ask that we animate suspension. Stereotypes typify instead the polysemy of allegory and affect; they impel the furtherance of readerly inspection and introspection rather than offering decisive closure. As much as this later love scene gestures back to the earlier one in which we witness Changez’s witness of terror as event, we might say that the confluence of stereotypes that follow from these scenes confirm a certain aporia of the event itself. “Something took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming,” Derrida says of the naming of 9/11 as “9/11,” “and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the ‘thing.’ But this very thing, the place and meaning of this ‘event,’ remains ineffable.” In a sense, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by naming the event and overlaying it with an excess of possible names that stereotyping allows, enables this kind of recognition. What took place for Changez on that occasion, as for Erica, and between them consequently, remains strikingly “ineffable.”

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This is not to say that the excesses of stereotype as allegory and affect erode the real event itself. The “thing” that takes place is even in Derrida’s account “something that took place.” Its naming or representation is the attempt to “conjure away, as if by magic  .  .  . the fear or terror it inspires.” The crush of literary stereotypes—about hypermasculinity, emasculated rage, fundamentalism, fanatic pleasure, impersonation, and disaffected or alienated subjects—that arrive in the wake of the spectacular act, however, are an attempt to bypass such an absence presence by exploring its affective turns. Something needs to be said about this link between stereotype and the map of terror’s affect that it inaugurates. It is important to realize, as Sara Ahmed points out, that we shouldn’t assume that “there is something called affect that stands apart or has autonomy, as if it corresponds to an object in the world, or even that there is something called affect that can be shared as an object of study.” Rather, the affective is the expansive and indeed inexhaustible terrain of “the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, and the trauma of contingency.” Stereotypes that gesture to terror as affect, as in the scene above or in other similar scenes, suggest the need to read the event as a composite of psychic, material, historical, institutional, and other less perceptible contingencies. If we read Changez’s situation closely—his fear of humiliation, his constant attempts to pass as American and as smart and worthy of his Ivy education, his increasing paranoia, his dwindling work ethic, his rising pride in Pakistan and a glorious Islam of old as well as his outrage at the xenophobia that he suffers—then it will be clear that the stereotypes aligned with him breach an old gap in how the affect of terror is conceived. Silvan S. Tomkins has famously detailed terror and fear as negative affects, along with shame, anger, anguish, distress, and disgust. However, Tomkins makes an important distinction between terror and shame when he writes that while distress is the affect of suffering, shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression and of alienation. Though terror speaks of life and death, and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, yet shame strikes deepest into the heart of man. While terror and distress hurt, they are wounds that are inflicted from outside which penetrate the

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smooth surface of the ego; but shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul.

Tomkins makes a startling distinction between terror as an outwardly external affect with no inward subjective correspondence in the psyche and the entirely internal wellspring of “alienation” and loss of “selfworth” that results from experiencing shame. This distinction is what stereotypes of “terror as affect” challenge us to reform. As terror outwardly bends toward life and death, so does its intimate entanglement with other affects, such as shame and distress. Tomkins reminds us that affects, unlike drives, have no clear or innate motivational objects. They are, as Eve Sedgwick so elegantly points out, uniquely free: “Affects can be and are attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects.” The slide between various stereotypes that invoke the affective life of terror compel us to think about affect itself as affected by all manner of contingencies. FROM SPECTER TO SPECTRALITY: SPECULATIVE FREEDOMS

This chapter began by suggesting that terror and work resonate as stereotypes of South Asia. This resonance has to do with the aesthetic appearance of each that demands that the reader interpret, even by way of a deferral, the allegorical and affective significations of the stereotype. If the stereotype of terror is governed by the logic of spectacle that is continually displaced, the stereotype of outsourcing operates by exposing the spectral economy of work as the condition of our transnational present. The spectacle of terror and the spectrality of transnational labor as represented in literary texts depend on keeping the frames of the text open to plural possibilities of reading. Stereotypes of terror and work conjoin the real with the phantasmic in persistent ways to make the exercise of reading them itself a central feature of these texts. Insofar as these stereotypes reflect real assumptions about global difference or the dispersal of privilege across the world, they ask that we insert ourselves into how these divides are imagined. In short, they compel readers to enter into the mimetic protocols of the text that frames its stereotypes.

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There is a peculiar formal symmetry between The Reluctant Fundamentalist and One Night at the Call Center that illustrates this point. Both books directly engage stereotypes of terror and work by inserting the reader into the frames of the narrative. Hamid’s novel, written in the first person from Changez’s point of view, opens and closes as a conversational monologue directed at an unseen interlocutor. The novel begins: Excuse me, Sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking at something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services.

This opening salvo accomplishes several things. It familiarizes us with Changez’s location in Pakistan and his bearded appearance. At the same time, it asks that we appraise any disquiet or fear we may harbor about the association of these stereotypical descriptors with danger. It also clarifies that his address is directed at a stereotypical recipient, an American tourist in Pakistan. The narrative is purposefully vague about this figure who remains shrouded in mystery. We only learn from Changez’s interjections that this “American” is paranoid, watchful, and suspicious of Changez’s every assertion and demeanor. The novel in effect suspends the reader between Changez and his invisible interlocutor, asking that we measure our responses to events that unfold against both these stereotypes. Readers are in a sense asked to mediate between Changez’s confessions and their reception by inserting themselves into the narrative. One Night at the Call Center, a popular pulp novel written in a colloquial language that mimics call center–speak, employs a similar but more direct narrative tactic. The novel details the travails of a group of young Indian employees at an American-run suburban outsourcing center in Gurgaon, New Delhi. Told from the perspective of Shyam, or Sam, as he is known to his overseas callers, the story unfolds over the course of a night, giving a glimpse into the nocturnal adventures of a call center. In casual fashion, the novel details the monotony, romantic trysts, and quotidian frustrations that a group of cultural impersonators working under the repressive regime of a top-down bureaucratic machine face.

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The novel, however, begins with a non sequitur address to the reader: “Before you begin this book,” Bhagat writes, “I have a small request. Right here, note down three things that i) you fear ii) make you angry iii) you don’t like about yourself.” This is followed by a form that reiterates the imperative (“Just do it”), urging that readers inscribe themselves into the preface of the story: One thing I fear: _____________________ One thing that makes me angry: _____________________ One thing that I do not like about myself: _____________________

For the reader who has complied, Bhagat adds that they may now “forget about this exercise” and proceed to “enjoy the story.” The effect that follows this kind opening is to create doubt about any reader’s capacity or ability to see their hopes, fears, and desires reflected in this novel about an invisible workforce. That the reader may not be sufficiently invested in making affective leaps between self and other is evidenced by the skepticism Bhagat evinces. For instance, he repeatedly doubts that any reader will comply with these instructions: “Be honest, say something meaningful to you,” he enjoins, and then asks, “Have you done it?,” followed by, “please forget . . . that I doubted you.” The initial distrust of the Anglophone reader gains purchase in the telling of the story itself. Never mentioned again, this form hovers like a meta-textual game of Mad Libs. Whatever may have been inscribed in it, we come to understand, is at worst nonsensical and at best tangentially related to the concerns about transnational work that the novel illuminates. Likewise, the main ploy of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is its narrative undecidability. Just as the novel begins with an address by Changez to an undisclosed anonymous listener, it closes by gesturing toward an entirely speculative ending. Having revealed his growing dissatisfaction with his corporate job, his brushes with racial profiling, the disintegration of his romance with Erica, and his decision to grow a beard and repatriate to Pakistan, the novel ends on a note of suspense. In this last moment as Changez and the mysterious American walk back to the

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hotel, they are caught in a sudden tussle. As before, we only perceive it through Changez: “I know,” Changez says to his inscrutable companion “you have found some of my views offensive; I hope you will not resist my attempt to shake you by the hand. But why are you reaching into your jacket, sir? I detect a glint of metal. Given that you and I are bound by a certain shared intimacy, I trust it is from the holder of your business cards.” The cliffhanger ending catapults into this single exchange all the stereotypes of terror and counterterror that have been flush all along in the novel but, importantly, does not offer any resolutions. Rather, we are left to contemplate the possibility of multiple outcomes, none of which are ascertained or offer closure. If anything, the novel leaves us with the sense that each of the stereotypes it invokes is readable only to the extent that it involves others, and only by virtue of our own implication in them. To the end, Changez remains equally a cipher for terror as for its other, a diligent cosmopolitan disoriented by the incursion of violence in his life. “I lacked a stable core,” he admits at one point. “I was not certain where I belonged—in New York, in Lahore, in both, in neither.” The repatriated Changez, now a professor in Pakistan who instructs his students about global injustice, may well be a model humanitarian reacting against the pressures of an inequitably globalized world. His confession that he was defined by “a sort of Third World sensibility” that makes him empathize with a jeepney driver on the streets of Manila bolsters such a reading. The violent eruption of 9/11, the novel implies, extends so far outward that it causes the likes of Changez to become disillusioned about his place in the world. This disillusionment seems most readily apparent in his growing feeling that as a “valuation” consultant whose only incentive is to consider revenues when appraising the livelihoods of others, he has inadvertently become “a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire.” Still, there is the disquiet that lingers in the novel’s caricature of its protagonist: his sudden joy at the sight of the towers collapsing, his casual “joke” to his Ivy League cohort that he “hoped one day to be the dictator of an Islamic republic with nuclear capability.” Juxtaposed against such conflicted portraits of Changez is the equally dubious status of the American. As a stereotypical tourist, he seems knowable to Changez, and hence to us, simply in terms of an abiding xenophobia engrained in his very “bearing” such that he “continues to appear ill

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at ease” at all times. His palpable and nervous alertness is potentially a sign that he is a covert agent abroad. The American is synonymous with the surreptitious dimensions of the latest war on terror as much as Changez is his counterfoil. Whether they reconcile as friends or fight unto death, the novel leaves each stereotype dialectically in tension with its other to solicit us as readers. The dialectic between transnational iterations of terror and work that The Reluctant Fundamentalist pauses on is one in which each stereotype evokes a reality that always assumes its most exaggerated expression. As readers of such Anglophone novels, we are fully interpellated within the schemes of geopolitical difference that each of the stereotypes presume. The question we are left with, as Leerom Medovoi aptly poses it, is “How does The Reluctant Fundamentalist cognitively, imaginatively, and affectively map a world in which Pakistan orbits around the U.S. in a larger global system of wealth, culture, and power?” I propose that it does so by deploying the inseparable ways in which stereotypes capture elements of reality while signaling to the ineffable and contingent transference of our affective ties. Moreover, stereotypes of terror and transnational work that double on each other are important not because they reveal something innate and abstract about Pakistan or America so much as because they move English readers to think about their own situation with respect to the novel’s design. “Hamid’s novel,” Medovoi argues, “is not so much of or by, but rather for Americans” because it takes America as the “object of its rhetorical design rather than its generative cultural ground.” By entering into its mimetic scenes, we are asked to evaluate our complicity in the rhetoric of an American parlance steeped in vigilance over how terror and labor are seen, experienced, and imagined. There is an overlay between how terror stereotypes and ideations of work circulate in the West with respect to the global south. In part, this parallel in the present time ensues from the speculative form that 9/11 as an event is conditioned on. The act of terror, while precise and real, has ripple effects that are entirely provisional. In this respect, terrorism, Faisal Devji astutely observes, has an uncanny resemblance to the operation of transnational economic transactions. Devji writes: While the attacks of 9/11, for instance, were meticulously planned, they were at the same time completely speculative as far as their effects were

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concerned, since these could neither be predicted with any degree of certainty, nor controlled in any fashion. Practices of terror . . . are akin to those of risk in the global economy.

Open ended, the spectacle of terror as much as the event itself hinges on an uncertain and purely unconfirmed prolepsis. Yet the unknowable outcome of both terror and global risk economies assumes certain reified commonplaces of how cultural difference is worlded, or how religious faith fervently felt, or how the piercing material lack that makes some available for exploitation is experienced. The divergent stereotypes that emerge of terror or work (which in some cases merge together—as with Changez, Karim, Chanu, Nazneen, Saladin, Gibreel, and many others) may resurrect these differences, but like the very things they typify, stereotypes also risk splitting the object of stereotyping in unforeseen ways. An important consequence of stereotypes of terror that are sutured to work is how they shape our view of global fractures between North and South, West and East. Whether terror is thought to be opposed to cultures of work emanating from the liberal West or, as is also the case, intrinsic to them depends on how the West is perceived in relation to the whole of the globe. As the novels examined in this book show, the West and East are no longer distinctive entities, if they could ever be said to have been. Devji argues that part of what motivates the most archaic jihad philosophies that yearn for a return to a pure past or that envision the violent institution of a pure identity in the future is the fear that the “West” has become increasingly synonymous with the “globe” following the Second World War. Rather than a distinctive cultural identity or contained territory, the West is understood as a hegemonic form of living that is ever expanding. In this vein, Devji asserts: “Having achieved something close to a world hegemony, the West has also become a global rather than a territorial entity, hence it is now a metaphysical rather than a geographical category.” The conflation between terror and work evoked in the context of South Asia could be thought as clarifying existential stakes in this more expanded fashion. Instead of plain codes of culture, language, food, religion, and such differences, these stereotypes provoke us to seriously consider the idea that being Western is, like being modern, an inevitable consequence of the present. They ask, moreover,

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that we consider our relationality to forms of recalcitrance as well as conformity to the West. The differential schemes through which stereotypes clarify this relationality can be understood if we move from thinking about the identification of terror with worlds other than American to the stereotype of outsourcing. It is worth noting the increasing popularity in the post-9/11 world of this particular stereotype. Aside from a slew of chick-lit and pulp novels such as Lisa Lim’s Confessions of a Call Center Gal (2011) and Dave Zeltserman’s Outsourced (2011), there are the immensely popular film and television series, Outsourced (2006) and its British-Indian counterpart, Mumbai Calling (2007). In these works the fierce culture clash that results in terror and retributive war is recast in a comedic light. Missed cultural cues provide grist for jokes that reify East–West differences by making light of the usual baggage of easily placed yet hilariously confusing culture markers: accents, skin tone, couture, food, dating habits, etc. Unlike terror, which is crystallized as a stereotype through its spectacular appearance, the work culture that outsourcing stereotypes naturalize is spectral. The spectacle of terror conveys the idea of a self divested of self-interest, while the predominant stereotype that coheres transnational service work is one of self-interest or self-promotion (Fig. 6.1). If the former expresses collective antagonisms more readily, the latter seems motivated by individual ambitions and incentivized achievements. As Shehzad Nadeem writes in his illuminating study of call centers, “globalization enthusiasts” believe that these new transnational economies are “characterized  .  .  . by an upward spiral of effort, innovation, and reward.” Nevertheless, both spectacular friezes of terror and spectral ideations of work elaborate the struggle over meanings of freedom itself. The debate over call center cultures, Nadeem argues, “provides purchase on the dialectic of freedom and constraint, or agency and social structure.” In Bhagat’s One Night at the Call Center, the call center workers spend the entire night keeping up with their hectic call quotas and pondering the meaning of the kind of work they do. The night swells with activity and moments of lull as they stage confrontations with Bakshi, their pompous manager, dwell on romantic interludes, cope with their personal foibles—from drug addiction to sour dispositions—and orchestrate breaks in the system for respite and pleasure. On one occasion they

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Figure . Film still from Outsourced (dir. John Jeffcoat). The workers at this small-town call center absurdly known as “Fulfillment” are so dedicated that when the office floods, they continue to field calls as an exaggerated sign of their unflagging work ethic in the face of unpredictable third-world infrastructural failures that should typically jeopardize their output.

cast aside their headphones when Vroom, the most boisterous in the group, incites everyone to take a “break” and head to an all-night bar. Surrounded by luminous LCD screens flashing images of Bollywood and the Iraq war, the characters fiercely debate their work conditions, linking the call center to urgent problems of globalization: The news on CNN was about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. . . . “Americans are sick,” Vroom said, as he pointed to a U.S. politician who had spoken out in support of the war. “Look at him. He’d nuke the whole world if he could have his way.” “No not the whole world. I don’t think they’d blow up China,” Priyanka said, sounding high. “They need cheap labor.” “Then I guess they won’t blow up Gurgaon either: They need the call centers,” Radhika said. “So we’re safe,” Esha said, “that’s good, Welcome to Gurgaon, the safest city on earth.”

Rife with stereotypes of American hubris and fury in the furtherance of a self-interested global order, this dialogue also secures stereotypes of

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the global south (China and India) as crucibles of dependency thoughtlessly expending its only resource: human capital. These petrified differences, however, urge us to reconsider popular investments in the burgeoning of invisible secondary labor forces the world over. More urgently, they compel us to evaluate Devji’s exhortation that these forms of work are a manifestation of Western forms of security and freedom on a global scale. The dispute between the night shifters is elaborated with passionate claims about both the virtues and degradations of night labor. Vroom is adamant that the work they’re immersed in is nothing short of servitude, but others remain unconvinced: “Our government doesn’t realize this, but Americans are using us. We’re sacrificing an entire generation to service our call centers,” Vroom said. . . . “C’mon, Vroom. Call centers are useful to us, too,” Esha said. “You know how hard it is to make fifteen grand a month outside. Here we are, sitting in an air-conditioned office, talking on the phone, collecting our pay and going home. And it’s the same for hundreds and thousands of us. What’s wrong with that?” “An air-conditioned sweatshop is still a sweatshop. In fact, it’s worse, because nobody sees the sweat. . . . 

While stereotypes of terror privilege tropes of visibility, stereotypes of cultural and geopolitical alterity that are evoked through labor, especially in the context of the flexible expansion of the intangible aspects of global capital, remain yoked to tropes of invisibility. If terror is an affect that invites us to consider the proximity of fear, shame, and rage through a visible show of violence, the invisibility of labor fuels some of the same affective responses but in forms that remain obscured. The quandary that Bhagat’s novel explores is about mapping the subjective worlds of those whose very existence depends on shrouding themselves, whether in the cover of night or in passing long distance as other than who they are. These equations of the global south, with inexhaustible yet hidden troves of human labor, move us toward contemplating the differences of culture or of national, religious, or regional feelings that are heightened by the play of increasingly shadowy extensions of capitalism. They impel the recognition that global capitalism requires such differences to

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explicitly and strategically deploy the rhetoric and performance of alterity in order to mask what Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff intriguingly identify as the “occult economies of many postcolonial societies.” Focused on South Africa, Comaroff and Comaroff explain the globalism of late capital through the resurgent figure of the zombie. Zombies, they propose, are emblematic of the “reserve armies of spectral workers” in the global south who today animate the “invisible hand of capitalism” that Adam Smith famously wrote about. Perplexed about the reemergence of zombie superstitions, Comaroff and Comaroff advance the following parallel: “In a world of flextime employment it is said that some people are made into ‘part-time zombies’ whose exhaustion in the morning speaks of an unwitting nocturnal mission, of involuntary toil on the night shift.” The figure of the zombie brings the issues at stake in call center stereotypes into perfect identity with the concerns of late capitalism. Aside from their invisible presence, zombie or “ghost labor” unveils the pervasive presence of “spectral workers” who serve bifurcated internal economies that are outwardly articulated toward a larger global order but entrench “shadowy alien-nations” within nations worldwide. The elusive animus of zombie workforces, these scholars note, keep alive “the enigma” of capitalism’s endless capacity to mysteriously replicate itself, thereby reinforcing its vitality through the seemingly swift and natural accumulation of wealth. The shrill debates that occur nightly between characters in Bhagat’s novel invoke stereotypes that “translate [the] structural contradictions, experiential anomalies and aporias” of transnational capitalism’s worldwide expansion “into the argot of human agency.” The disputes between Vroom and the others over whether call center work is beneficial or detrimental to India’s future ask that we consider the cleavage between work as freedom and work as bondage that frames this debate. Call center labor is represented as potentially magical in the sense of how slums appear magical (Fig. 6.2). Call centers are analogous to what the authors of zombie capitalism describe as “gaming rooms,” those iconic metaphors for capital’s avant-garde advances where chance, human vitality, and the concealment of actual muscular and affective resources give the mystical appearance of capital’s unencumbered ascendance. Conversely, the novel asks that we contend with internal frictions and varied affects— including pride, shame, fear, and anger—that are triggered by this kind

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of night work. The call center in One Night at the Call Center, after all, is repeatedly disrupted by its workers, incompetent management, longdistance shaming, dissolute work behaviors, and, most absurdly, a phone call from none other than God—all of which ask that we appraise the real and existential dimensions of its functions. In other words, the novel asks what meaning we should ascribe to certain stereotypical portraits of human agency and freedom that are anchored to the increasingly ubiquitous presence of call center work. As Nadeem observes, the initial euphoria over call center labor as cheap, easy, and desirable is a stereotype that itself is being questioned. The idea is gaining currency that, rather than enabling a freedom of self, this work impels a self-hood still caught within a restrictive ideological game. This kind of labor is none other than a form of “cyber coolie” work in “sites [that] are sweatshops,” meaning “that outsourcing is a technologically updated version of colonial subjection.” The other salient way in which differences between terror and labor are articulated is through genre. Novels that visualize terror and its aftereffects usually conform to the generic codes of gothic horror and tragedy. The effects of cultural mistranslations, malaise, and disaffections in novels dealing with flexible and mobile work cultures more commonly find expression through romantic comedy and comedies of error. Each, however, often veers toward its opposite. The horrific stereotypes of terror conjure moments of dark humor just as unpredictably as do the romantic comedies that proceed through tragic misunderstandings. Just as stereotypes of terror gesture toward a symbolics of impersonation, so too do novels of cross-cultural work. Indeed, cultural mimicry is understood to be an endemic aspect of the labor performed in call centers. As George Monbiot writes, British corporate cultures of outsourcing extend the practices of  .  .  . colonial predecessors, they oblige their Indian workers to mimic not only our working methods, but also our accents, our tastes and our enthusiasms, in order to persuade customers in Britain that they are talking to someone down the road. The most marketable skill in India today is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else’s.

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Figure . Film still from Outsourced (dir. John Jeffcoat). The magical inventiveness of outsourced labor is shown in the film when the call center workers relocate to take calls under the stars on the rooftop of their building, humorously suggesting that there is in them a natural ease that adapts to such flexibility. The time restrictions that govern their efficiency remains center screen, buoyed by their ability to again find a solution to any crisis in the work night—in this case the piracy of electricity so that their computers remain online.

If we remember Bhabha’s claim that cultural mimicry maintains an ambivalence between menace and mockery, we may say that the generic force of these works engage us in stereotypes of impersonation that convey terror as menace and zombie work as mockery. Thus, The Reluctant Fundamentalist ends on an ominous note while One Night at the Call Center, Outsourced, and the rest regale us with the buffoonery of missed cultural cues—the stupidity of American callers, the loose mispronunciations and language gaffes between callers in different worlds, and the incessant silly humor of “the manager’s language or Managese,” which we are told is another “language like English and American.” Such moments of stereotypic exaggeration and ambivalence compel us toward reading stereotypes as vertiginous signs that hover between the real and fantastic, implicating readers in each stereotype’s mimetic dance.

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STEREOTYPES, MIMESIS, AND TRANSNATIONAL READING

In closing, let us consider my argument that the stereotype’s relation to mimesis is key to understanding its salience to the global novel. Stereotypes in global fictions, I have suggested, have a volatile relationship to reality and fantasy. Anchored uniquely to the real, stereotypes reproduce reality in such aggressive, exaggerated ways as to reveal their mimetic signatures. If mimesis is understood as a kind of mirroring of the real where the artistic representation attempts a semblance or copy of reality, stereotypes put this kind of semblance into duress. In other words, stereotypes such as the ones discussed in this book—of populations, slums, migrancy, terror, and transnational labor—circumscribe a reality of South Asia that by virtue of being fictional is never quite a true reflection. They, in fact, compromise at every turn the rigors of mimesis as copy. Fictional stereotypes, in short, call themselves out as stereotypes. In this chapter I point to the ways in which tropes of semblance and dissemblance, such as mimicry, allegory, and affect, are crucial to how we understand stereotypes of terror and work in global novels. As mimetic ciphers, stereotypes achieve several ends by extending themselves through allegory and affect. They implicate us in the multiple gestures of mimesis that collate the material, sensory, and aesthetic filters that intercept our approach of the real. The allegorical and affective dimensions of stereotypes additionally provoke a consideration of how the real and the phantasmic must necessarily be joined in a reading practice to make sense of their worldly nuances. Finally, stereotypes manage the traffic between how sameness and difference are experienced in works of fiction to give us an understanding of what the global or transnational novel is. To say that the stereotype is an exceptional mimetic device in the novel is to suggest that it is especially endowed with the powers of imitation. In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach powerfully suggests that imitation of reality is one of the most distinctive features of the novel. The stereotype as a form of mimesis shows that the space between ground and figure that mimesis opens is indeed vast and open to disturbances and interpretation. Stereotypes as mimetic tools move us beyond an assumption that the relations between the original, real, historical world and its artistic reproduction are static. They urge us to consider how literary and other

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forms of mimesis create our notions of what is real. Barbara Fuchs offers a helpful revision of Auerbach’s concept of mimesis to allow us think of the work that stereotypes as mimetic forms are capable of doing. “What I propose instead [of Auerbach’s idea of mimesis],” Fuchs writes, “is a concept of mimesis as the fun-house mirror, the reflection that dazzles the impersonator, the sneaky copy, the double agent—mimesis, that is, as a deliberate performance of sameness that necessarily threatens, or at least modifies the original.” By pressing on the ineluctable gap between reality and its image or imitation, stereotypes shake up the heuristic of the real that prevails in our attempts to understand cultural and global differences. They are the double agents and sneaky copies that Fuchs identifies as intrinsic to mimesis, ones that modify what we understand to be the grounds for real differences. Stereotypes, we could say, force us to question and reinvent the subjects and subjectivities they attach to, including our own. In previous chapters I suggested that stereotypes carry anthropological heft that governs their making of reality. The allegorical pointers and sensuous play of affect that attach to stereotypes of terror and work bear traces of the real. In both cases, the stereotypes inhere the paradoxical pulls of verism between the sensuous, material, anthropological world and its more various novelistic reflections that are also just as real. Not only that, stereotypes alter our perception that material and imaginative tracks are epistemologically distinct. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s and Benjamin’s ideas, Michael Taussig argues that a collapse of these two dimensions of the real is part and parcel of the mimetic faculty itself. Mimesis, which is an attempt “to get hold of something by means of likeness,” involves a “two layered” notion, namely that it is “a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived.” In his revealing study, Taussig goes on to identify what he calls the “mimetic machines” of colonial culture—namely, figurines, images, the camera, and the gramophone—to show how they unsettle and implicate those who venture into any intimacy with these forms of mimesis: “Mastery is no longer possible,” Taussig writes, “What remains is unsettled and unsettling interpretation in constant movement with itself . . . because the interpreting self is itself grafted onto the object of study. The self enters into the alter against which the self is defined and sustained.” We might

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extend Taussig’s insights on mimesis to the stereotype as a special feature of global novels. Stereotypes are mimetic devices that can go awry in how they are read and invite a parody of mimesis itself. Stereotypical images in global novels engage the interpreting reader, thereby affecting both the reader and that which is being stereotyped in the first place. As a mimetic quilting point that brings the real and imaginary into simultaneous relief, stereotypical novels such as the ones examined in this book are themselves “mimetic machines.” This means that the global novel emerges through stereotypical mimesis as an “object of study” that deliberately asks that the “interpreting self ” be grafted to it by a reading practice or ethical relation that gives meaning to the stereotype’s narrative relevance. The mimetic faculty, Benjamin notes, harbors a special human tendency for “seeing resemblances” so that a dialectical relation to others may substitute for an introspective idea of the self. Benjamin goes on to say that this desire to resemble “is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.” The stereotype in contemporary fiction stretches this effect of mimesis, one that Benjamin identifies as a hangover effect that brings the primitive, alterior, or antecedent past to coexist internally with the modern human subjective present. In the present moment, the mimesis of stereotypes should be understood as an effort to read a mimetic scene. David Damrosch has defined world literature as a “mode of reading”: “World literature is not a set canon of texts but a mode of reading, a detached engagement with a world beyond our own.” The transnational novel’s traffic in stereotypes encourages a mode of reading that is precisely about attaching ourselves with worlds beyond our own or, to echo Benjamin, finding ourselves in something else. When these novels signal our indifference or detachment to certain stereotypes, they compel, as Taussig would have it, an unsettling but ethical consideration of why mimesis fails under certain circumstances in its charge to induce a sensuous, palpable connection between perceiver and perceived. One further point may be made about the relation between stereotypes and the transnational novel, one of the objects where its mimetic effects take shape. The final bind in which fictional stereotypes place us as Anglophone readers is one that calls the status of the novel as commodity

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or material object to the fore. Marx opens Capital with the reminder that “a commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach or the imagination, makes no difference.” When we encounter stereotypes in global novels, they entangle us in a reading of our own wants and fancies in relation to the ones articulated in the novel, and in relation to our consumption of the novel itself. As a commodity in transnational circulation that is also concerned with the effects, desires, and impressions that it augurs in a cosmopolitan reading public, the invocation of stereotypes in these novels enfolds the book as object in the sublime subtleties that define the commodity itself. If we consider that fictional stereotypes activate our desires and fears in comparative frames, exposing our fetishistic consumption of resemblance and difference, then we can see how this leads to a reckoning of political and ethical urgencies. Our immersion in these stereotypes is a point of scrutiny that these novels impel as much as a scrutiny of the stereotypes themselves. To the extent that this is part of the reading practice required of these novels, they hold out the possibility that we may conceive a more robust and political sense of what transnational literature is. Rebecca Walkowitz usefully suggests that we think of transnational literature as “comparison literature” in which “comparison functions, too, as one of the novel’s abiding ethical concerns: the text asks whether transnational enlargement in fact enhances—or ultimately thwarts—our capacity for social and political agency.” Because stereotypes facilitate such comparisons of our affective and locational allegiances, they are, as I explain in the epilogue, crucial to framing a textual politics of transnationalism. Pascale Casanova has argued that the “world republic of letters” may be conceived of in terms of the “literary capital” or credit that accrues to books that can garner an easy transnational market. Casanova writes that the manufacture and profit indices of fictions for transnational markets “create a new composite measure of fictional modernity. . . . Under the label of ‘world fiction,’ products based on tested aesthetic formulas and designed to appeal to the widest possible readership  .  .  . are marketed [which] . . . adopt all familiar devices of exoticism.” The appearance of stereotypes at times parlay our acceptance of formulaic or exotic

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aesthetics into probing our relationship to hypermanaged literary production. For Casanova, part of the formula of marketable letters includes the prevalence of novelistic self-referentiality, the novel within the novel, that she says signals a “false self-referential erudition that makes the book its own subject—an effect of the perceived necessity of imitating Borgesian modernity.” I suggest instead that stereotypes that return us to the thresholds of thinking about transnationalism in terms of our uneven dependencies on and access to certain commodity fetishes, such as for novels of cultural difference, can produce a pedagogical shift that is more critical of the politics of transnationalism, in which both the novel and we, its readers, participate. There is a scene in Brick Lane that gives a hint of this possibility. On 9/11, Ali describes Chanu and Nazneen enthralled, as we may expect, by the spectacle on television: “Quick. Be quick!” He shouts. “Put on the television.” . . . Nazneen glances over at the screen. The television shows a tall building against a blue sky. . . . “This is the start of madness,” says Chanu. . . . Nazneen moves closer. A thick bundle of smoke is hanging outside the tower. It looks too heavy to hang there. An aeroplane comes in slow motion from the corner of the screen. It appears to be flying at the level of the buildings. Nazneen thinks she had better get on with her work.

This scene, the only reference to 9/11 in the novel, fortifies the usual stereotypes of terror as spectacle, madness, and affect. Ali contrasts Chanu’s overexcitement at the attacks with Nazneen’s indifference. Rather than the damage she sees on television, her concerns are with the limits of the screen itself, the way it makes things “appear,” and with her desire to “get on with her work.” Against this backdrop, the omniscient narrative reinforces the spectacle of the attack, “The aeroplane,” Ali writes, “comes again. The television shows it again and again” until eventually “Nazneen and Chanu fall under its spell.” The repeat spectacles of terror, however, are disarranged by Chanu’s convulsive reactions as much as Nazneen’s pressing worry about the conditions of her work. Whether we are perplexed at Nazneen’s stupor or empathize with her

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beleaguered worry over work, identify with Chanu’s hysteria or see in it a caricature of itinerant Muslim immigrant reactions to these events, or are swayed by the novel’s implication that television produces the affect of the moment altogether, we are asked to measure their responses to ours. Much as in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, this scene peddles in stereotypes yet sets them adrift. In order to read it in any way, we have to enter its mimetic protocols. The opening pages of In Stereotype began with the suggestion that we understand South Asia as a loose cultural collective immured in a surplus of meanings that are continually shaped by, and in turn shape, the stereotypes used to designate it. So far as we relate to this collective through fictional stereotypes, we give ourselves over to the magic of mimesis and in so doing unsettle commonly held boundaries between the real and the fictive, the historical and the imaginative, external collectives and the interiority of our individual selves. This idea that finding the “real India” through global fiction will stymie our notions of reality itself and bring to crisis how we understand ourselves innately in relation to difference marked in terms of culture or globe has long been a part of the Anglophone literary landscape. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) famously casts Adela Quested’s desperate quest to “see the real India” as an impossible fantasy that leads to a permanent rift in any possibility for reconciliation between empire and colony. Forster’s recognition that any attempt to render India in an English novel by showcasing its customs and people remains in part “a frieze” speaks to the stereotypes about the lascivious Indian, the prudish Englishwoman, the benevolent colonizer, and the hardened one that his novel both brings to life and parodies. Early modernist anxieties about how cultural stereotypes proliferate distinctions between “self ” and “other” and prohibit a collective reckoning with histories of cross-cultural violence from the past also haunt many subcontinental writers of the previous generation. Apart from modernism’s anxiety about otherness, the tussle between social realist novels and the genre of magical realism, both of which have deep roots on the subcontinent, is indicative of the fissures that arise in literary texts concerned with representing the reality of the subcontinent through make-belief. In this context, stereotypes offer a crucial pause in the politics of

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representation by asking that we contemplate their extravagant invocation of reality in terms of difference. In other words, stereotypes, excessively invented and given to reinvention and repetition, are indices for how cultural capital worldwide is expressed and accumulated on the basis of our imaginative approaches to alterity.

EPILOGUE THE AFTERLIFE OF STEREOTYPES

Now in Injia’s sunny clime, Where I used to spend my time A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen, Of all them black-faced crew The finest man I knew Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din. —Rudyard Kipling, “Gunga Din” (1892)

The global literary imaginary is constituted on the basis of stereotypes that cast entire swaths of the global south as exceptionally different. However, as I have been arguing, stereotypes of South Asia in Anglophone literature interrupt and realign our ideas about how we relate to scenes of cultural and geopolitical difference. Stereotypical portraits urge a critical evaluation of our psychic, social, and political allegiances in a transnational world carved on the basis of differences mediated by colonial and neo-imperial sensibilities. Because stereotypes, contrary to popular perception, are malleable, they seep into our consciousness in other ways. As I indicate in the introduction, stereotypes appear to sediment forms of alterity and otherness but are resonant because they reveal our investments as readers. That is, they implicate us in them as interpretive agents as much as they signify dominant prejudices. In so doing, stereotypes recreate and rearrange the mimetic scenes of reality that they engage. Throughout this book I have explored the relation between the mimetic force of literary stereotypes and what may be called a transnational reading practice.

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To say that stereotypes compel us to contemplate, even evaluate, the obdurate and altering realities of a globalized world is to say that their appearance in texts concerned with representing cultural difference fundamentally engages the ethics of reading global fiction. Critical reflection on what it means to encounter cultural difference in fiction is often linked to certain practices of reading. In response to the question, “what is world literature?,” David Damrosch argues that the meaning of world literature may be thought through a unique relationship between “the world, the text, and the reader.” This confluence leads Damrosch to make the claims that, rather than a fixed canon, world literature exists in an “elliptical” relation with national literatures, that it “gains in translation,” and, as I note in my remarks on mimesis in the last chapter, that it is “a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time.” The worlding of world literature, to borrow Said’s earlier phrase, thus depends on a practice or way of reading texts outside of the classical European canon. This is a point that Franco Moretti also advances in a vastly different but equally provocative account of Weltliteratur. For Moretti, any consideration of world literature should eschew close reading of canonical texts in favor of reading distantly, where “distance” becomes “a condition of knowledge” that promotes analysis of “units much smaller and larger than the text.” Moretti’s distant reading takes the “detached engagement” that Damrosch advocates to an extreme. In his view, because distantly reading the texts’ “devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems,” of which stereotypes are a part, is so entirely divested from reading closely, it allows “the text itself [to] disappear” in the process. Confronting fictional stereotypes of cultural difference, however, never allows the text itself to vanish. The appearance of stereotypes entails making choices about reading texts for and against the grain of a stereotype’s symbolic and imitative value so as to always keep the story’s rendering of a worldview in sight. The task of reading stereotypes in global fictions, hence, overlaps with and diverges from these influential critical accounts of world literature. In my view, what Damrosch and Moretti describe as world literature slides easily into what is designated as global fiction. These contemporary Anglophone texts gain global popularity (and influence) through translation, articulate local as well as transnational concerns, and engage all readers in ethical acts of reading. To the extent that

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world literature comprises a system that is “one and unequal” to show the “asymmetry in international power” between various cultures, this is also at the kernel of that which is designated as global fiction. However, unlike Damrosch and Moretti, I claim that the transnational resonance of stereotypes and how they engage readers is always about situating readers’ interests (even in terms of their detachment or disinterest) in relation to worlds of difference. It is to highlight this element of interestedness that pervades our critical incapacity to truly think about world literatures in terms of difference that Spivak voices the following caution: The intuition of literature comes from what I would like to believe, from what little I know about the world I assume. This is because the assumption of a world in order to distinguish the agent of assumption from other experiencing beings becomes deeply personal, even when and as always it must embrace all persons and beings. . . . Discourses of worldliness are autobiographical in genre and confessional in institution, even when their interest is exactly not so.

This means that any theory of worldly, worldwide fictions—be it about literature’s global reach, its various worldwide strands, or the crosscultural mobility of its metaphors—must explain how these conjectures maintain certain interests, in “instrument[s] of humanism,” for instance, that inform the theory’s ideas about what aesthetics does in the world. My view of interested global fictions shares with recent theories of world literature the notion that literature is part of, as well as reflects, a world that is “profoundly unequal,” as Moretti puts it. When they appear in fictions, global stereotypes of other cultures—especially of those where liberal capitalism’s vitalism is less thriving or more precarious—ask that we confront how, when, and what narratives of cultural privilege earn purchase and why. To do so, we must first recognize—as Vilashini Cooppan asks us to do—that “literary globalism in the mode of imperialism becomes a suspect ethics of (dis)engagement in which other literatures and cultures are recognized, even valorized, in order that their existence in some temporal anteriority or spatial exteriority may rehabilitate; shore up; and, to use a popular term, globalize the privileged narratives of the West.” The appearance of cultural stereotypes as readerly devices stirs

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the intuition that global fiction is complicit with worldwide power differentials of globalization. Cooppan rightly suggests that the paradoxical pulls of literary globalism inhere because texts that risk being appropriated into an age-old narrative of imperial assimilation often also encapsulate the demand that we “imagine the other as other.” How these competing textual imprints are negotiated ultimately rests on what Cooppan (borrowing from Derek Attridge) calls the “ethics of reading.” “This is an ethics of reading whose goal,” she writes, “cannot be the conversion of otherness to sameness, an ethics of reading that must instead choose to stay blocked from that final assimilative moment, at home in the very moment of non-recognition.” The ethics of reading that fictional stereotypes urge, however, springs not from the singular predilections of individual readers, as much as they are motivated from within the elements of narrative itself. Thus, while for Attridge and Cooppan, the ethical reading practice necessary for properly handling world literature’s cultural otherness necessitates self-consciously “working against the mind’s tendency to assimilate the other to the same, attending to that which can barely be heard,” and so on (Attridge), or willfully “choosing to stay blocked” from certain co-opting tendencies (Cooppan), I suggest that texts themselves may contain keys that unlock such readings. The wildly suggestive modes by which stereotypes circulate to denote cultural differences in symbolic and imitative terms are particularly designed to stimulate ethical quandaries from within narrative. In The Act of Reading, Wolfgang Iser writes about how reading produces meaning. He argues that texts use various overt devices to aid readers, such as narrators, characters, plot, and even “intended readers” (itself a textual construct), but texts also contain “gaps” to stimulate readers to ideate. “The structured blanks of the text,” Iser’s theory of reader response proposes, “stimulate the process of ideation to be performed by the reader on terms set by the text.” This means that the ethics of reading is a consequence of textual design or aesthetics as much as it is about a reader’s subjective inclination. Any “reader-oriented theory,” Iser acknowledges, “is from the outset open to the criticism that it is a form of uncontrolled subjectivism.” However, as he influentially shows, texts—especially modern ones—are full of indeterminacies and gaps that spur reading: “By impeding textual coherence, the blanks transform

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themselves into stimuli for acts of ideation,” Iser writes. Reading as an aesthetic response, in Iser’s account, depends on “the fundamental asymmetry between text and reader,” that “lack of a common situation and a common frame of reference” that stereotypes in particular exploit. Iser’s theories of reading, influenced by phenomenology and gestalt psychology, account for the discontinuous, ambivalent traces in texts that assail readers, such as those represented by stereotypes, which in turn enable the text’s gestalten, or projections. Textual stimulation that is not wholly reliant on the unique subjectivism of the reader, for Iser, forms the substantive core of imaginative practices of reading. A conception of text-based ethics of reading is important to this study about the stereotype’s motility within colonial and postcolonial scenes of writing precisely because it lets us imagine both the limits and the possibilities of literary globalism. Missing in our analyses of contemporary fictions are not accounts about the diffusion of experiences about differences in them but an ability to see how they coherently engage the subtle proliferations of sameness and difference that an uneven globalization, which is our present circumstance, encourages. To advance such an aim, Rebecca Walkowitz makes the bold case for synthesizing our approach to the genre of transnational literature, arguing that these mostly Anglophone “texts ask whether transnational enlargement in fact enhances— or ultimately thwarts—our capacity for social and political agency.” This desire to test our literary present for its ethical impetuses is certainly at the heart of my contentions about stereotypicality in many of our transnational fictions. Stereotypes predictably reinforce ideas of global social advance along cultural fault lines that promote Western capitalist codes of liberal civility. What is surprising is that their appearance as fictions is also uniquely generative in provoking readers toward recalcitrant responses to liberalism’s normally accepted ideas for thinking of social progress. Ian Baucom, drawing on the work of Stuart Hall, reminds us that the acquisitive, accumulative desires consecrated by globalization are always anxious. Baucom writes, “The spectral counter-narrative of the global, is one of cultural haunting. . . . If the form of the global is that in which expansion contracts and contraction enriches, it is also that in which enriching haunts.” Global fictions, I suggest, offer a vision of such hauntings. Beyond this, whether these literary provocations have any other revolutionary effects remains to be seen. Perhaps the potential

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to incite revolution is too much to ascribe to fictions that appear under the sign of the global at all. Walkowitz is optimistic about comparison literature to define anew the terms of literary engagement with the aesthetics of globalism. She identifies altered historical conditions of the circulation and production of texts, flourishing migrant communities, increased statelessness, burgeoning cosmopolitical sensibilities, the multilingualism of nations, and technological advancements in publishing and translation as keys to the rise of comparison literature. More crucially, she suggests that these global fictions, “born-translated” across many linguistic registers, are immensely portable. “Designed to travel,” they are accessible to a wide variety of readers because they are less idiomatically peculiar, and they stress narrative over vernacular eccentricities. For these reasons, she claims these works are better able to explore and widely disseminate “gestures of ethical, national, and generic comparisons” across “many discursive registers.” The circulation of stereotypes in Anglophone novels about South Asia and the kinds of ethical conundrums they project are certainly akin to the conditions and effects Walkowitz describes for comparison literature. We might conclude by noting that fictional stereotypes in Anglophone literary texts hold in balance two very different views of literature’s worldliness. In the one, the global transit of fiction compels us toward a utopian ethics, imagining that difficulties of cultural translation and sovereignty might yet be overcome by a planetarity to come. This is the vision that Wai Chee Dimock forwards when she writes about a “literature for the planet” that crisscrosses time and space, “play[s] havoc with territorial sovereignty,” and “urges on us the entire planet as a unit of analysis.” This literary anthropology accepts the morphology of literature as unique and even timeless, “the most robust inhabitants of the planet, a species tougher than most.” The kind of literary continuum Dimock is hopeful about depends, as do the ethical dilemma fictional stereotypicality poses, on “an emerging globalizing readership.” For Dimock, the sheer dispersion of literary audiences across the planet— where “to each of [a text’s] readers [the literary text] holds out a different map, a different time scale, predating and outlasting the birth and death of any nation”—ensures literature’s expansive capacity to exceed the most pernicious and rooted forms of nationalism. This view assumes that

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literary texts have a temporality (longevity) and spatiality (circulation) that is exceptional, outlasting and out-mobilizing all other institutional forms so as to make them “impossible to regulate or police.” Here the literary text is exuberantly imagined in terms of the most utopian escapist fantasy possible, as isomorphic with cosmic senses of time-space (the entire planet is its domain) and freedom. In quite another view, as in the one forwarded by Pascale Casanova, literature’s globality is parsed in terms of relations of power. Casanova’s “world republic of letters” emulates, even while remaining quite distinct from, the rules of valuation, circulation, and power that govern political and economic realms. “This world republic of letters has its own mode of operation: its own economy, which produces hierarchies and various forms of violence; and above all, its own history,” Casanova writes. She explains that in such an aggressive world of letters, any national literature’s worldwide influence and interest are carefully calibrated on the basis of value factors such as prestige, age, and reputation (i.e., literary heritage); linguistic-political dominance; the competitive transactions between writers, critics, and patrons; and the cultural milieu or normative judgments validated by particular historical times and places. This model of the commodification of world literary cultures is what Casanova, following Bourdieu, terms “literary capital” and argues is the most formative unit of literary significance. Unlike Dimock, the narrative about world literature Casanova gives is inherently pessimistic. It posits literature as always circumscribed by locations of power, sharing in similar interests in “the appearance, accumulation, concentration, distribution, and diversion of literary wealth” alone, even if in seemingly autonomous ways. Casanova argues that only by considering the “the totality” of “world literary space” can we understand the particular meanings of individual texts. She contends that the contours of this world literary space can only be understood as “ordered by power relations . . . in which languages become instruments of power.” This focus on the global circuits of literary capital invariably produces a teleology of literary merit that aligns closely with the historical distributions of political and economic capital. So in Casanova’s account, an international literary space is first created by Latin in sixteenth century Italy, reaches its apex in France shortly after, shifts to Spain and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and is finally ushered

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in by late-blooming North American and Latin American writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These primary sites of literary worth are followed by the ever-trailing decolonial areas of the globe (Africa, Asia, South East and Middle East). Thus, for Casanova, just as England is accepted as the most powerful purveyor of colonial political power, France and French language and mores forge the empire of global literary culture (“Paris became the capital of the literary world”; “Paris has become synonymous with literature”). There are many reasonable critics of Casanova’s thesis who point to the shared colonial literary histories, the anterior examples, and the multiply splintering influences of various literary domains that challenge the centrality of France and the progressive teleology of aligning Europe, and France in particular, so centrally and exclusively with the invention of literature. Yet the disconcerting dare that Casanova forwards is the notion that literature is never that different, even when it appears to be, from the operational economies of social power. If we are to read Casanova carefully and generously, it is this—literature’s complicity with how power is enunciated—that remains hard to argue against. As I hope I have shown, stereotypes in global fictions mime the real and mine the fantastic to allow us both to discern the utopian impulses of global fictions and to realize their insertions within hierarchies of global power. The ethics of reading that they compel are planetary insofar as they move us toward an identification with cultural others elsewhere that transcend our own locations and subjective differences. Reading that shifts our weltanschauung to give us an intuition of radical, not relative, difference is what Spivak calls “teleopoesis”: the figural approach toward a difference as yet unknown in an attempt to change our assumed values. Writing about reforming the commitments of comparative literature, Spivak explains that teleopoesis “effects shocks to the idea of belonging, to affect the distant in a poesis—an imaginative making—without guarantees” to “reverse” the values of belonging. The utopian, unforeseeable promise of teleopoesis, Spivak writes, is “a reaching toward the distant other by the patient power of the imagination, a curious kind of identity politics, . . . [where] we beg the question of collectivity, on behalf of our discontinuous pasts, teleopoesis wishes to touch a past that is historically not ‘one’s own.’ . . . We must ask, again and again, how many are we? Who are they? . . . These are the questions of collectivity, asked as culture runs

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on.” Such aspirational gestures toward others that ask us to rethink our collective identifications are what is at stake in the ethics of reading that stereotypes provoke. The easy recognition of difference that stereotypic forms conjure nevertheless confirm deep suspicions about the extent to which our aesthetic preferences are governed by a mimesis fully caught up in vast networks of power and disenfranchisement. In other words, literary stereotypes initiate a naïve mimetic referentiality vis-à-vis cultural difference and easily confound it. This effect of fictional stereotypes is ultimately anthropological—in the expanded sense that they suggest a literary planetary consciousness as meant by Dimock, and in the more particular trace of ethnic, racial, and cultural separation that they maintain. Hence, as I have been arguing with regard to the appearance of stereotypes in the context of Anglophone novels of and about South Asia, global fictions replete as they are with stereotypes always contain such anthropological remainders. Indeed, an anthropological subtext to literature calls for thinking about the literary in the round terms that James Clifford suggests for anthropology when he describes the “literariness of anthropology.” As anthropology has to recognize the literary processes of metaphor, figuration, and narrative in its efforts to read culture, so too might literary texts engage the stereotypical “ethnographic fictions” that are everywhere present in them. Hhe “constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts,” Clifford suggests, make ethnographies fiction-like. Likewise, stereotypes in literary texts produce truth-claims about cultures that are easily affirmed because they appear at first glance to be entirely imaginative. It is how we read these always ambivalent claims within and without the fictions in which they appear that is most pressing in determining the political and social obligations they inspire. An example here may serve us well. The stereotypical images of colonial servitude represented by Kipling’s “black-faced” subaltern, Gunga Din, says as much or more about the Queen’s soldier who encounters him in India as it does about Gunga Din’s abject status. In Gunga Din, Kipling’s readers encounter a stereotype of India and Indians that is excessively grotesque—Gunga Din is “squidgy nosed,” “dusty,” “limping,” filthy and subservient—as well as pathetically valiant. After all, he braves the ravages of battle to ensure that the soldiers who call out to him in their dying moments are ministered to. As a stereotype, Gunga

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Din unsettles the edifice of colonial feelings of superiority. The soldier’s recognition that Gunga Din is the “finest” of men, reinforced by his closing salvo, “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!,” prompts a colonial reader to reopen seemingly settled questions about the humanity, valor, loyalty, and friendship between imperial and imperialized cultures. Gunga Din stands as an expression of colonialism’s steadfast stereotypes about Indian difference as manifest in the servants’ abject and ever-ready loyalty. Still, it is also about how the poem’s sacrificial logic may be read in ways that dislodge complacent ideas about English superiority, particularly within colonialism’s military or barracks culture. Contemporary Anglophone literature, authored by postcolonial writers and focused on the postcolony, invokes stereotypes that evince concerns reminiscent of a colonial past but nevertheless contingent on new and present formations. The world is no longer parsed experientially between colony and metropolis, colonizer and colonized. The separations and intimacies of a colonial past find new iterations in our transnational present that are sometimes far more confusing. Fictive portraits of South Asia’s overpopulation, slums, migration, cheap labor, and terror signal the shifting ground of stereotypes under globalization. They also call attention to how older attitudes and relations of dominance have acquired new forms that demand an altered critical perspective on how we engage them. In Stereotype makes the case that a whole range of stereotypes arises in contemporary global novels about South Asia that provokes urgent responses in us about how we see ourselves situated as part of or apart from the global south. Indeed, our sense of ourselves is as much in play when we immerse ourselves in these stereotypical narratives about the cultural and social milieu of life lived elsewhere. Stereotypes of South Asia as overly fecund, crowded places of squalor, inhumanity, injury, and danger fix dubious, world-dividing distinctions while also calling attention to a uniquely global imaginary where such differences become manifestly coherent. These stereotypes work because they are profoundly insecure, shifting their shape to reflect the permeable boundaries that exist between social and fictive worlds. Stereotypes, as I suggest in the introduction, can lead us toward interrogating how we understand or witness the reality and, indeed, experience of life elsewhere. Rushdie’s novel, for instance, doesn’t simply convey the idea that the postcolony is

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multitudinous. It creates profound uncertainty about the energies and schisms within the multitudes he conjures as emblematic of the postcolony. “The point about stereotypes,” Rushdie asserts in one of his essays, “is that, in spite of their banality, in spite of their evident wrongness, they work. They have effects.” The purpose of this book is to show how stereotypes work, and what effects linger. Of course, it is impossible to catalogue the effects of fictive stereotypes in an exhaustive manner. Nor may this be desirable or useful to do. What I hope I have done instead is to argue for their relevance in considering the influence of global fiction—an influence that pervades how we read global novels and also, by extension, the worlds they represent. In the introduction to In Stereotype, I speculatively offered a few theses about the stereotypes’ capacity to conjoin real and fictive worlds, regurgitate the formulaic in fantastic new ways, engage us affectively, and thereby embroil us in games of recognitions and misrecognitions. In conclusion, I extend and test these hypotheses by taking a slightly unpredictable course. That is, I suggest that these premises offer others that are equally important if we are to think of stereotypes not just as banal or flat linguistic tools but as rich sites of negotiation and ethical relation. These further claims may be made about stereotypes: t
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NOTES

PROLOGUE: STEREOTYPES AS PROVOCATION

1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

From the festival website, http://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/. Ibid. Rashmi Sadana estimates that festival attendance has grown from “over several hundred to 50,000.” Sadana, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, 195n1. Jyoti Thottam reports crowd estimates of 60,000 in 2012. Thottam, “At India’s Jaipur Literary Festival.” Event producer Sanjoy Roy noted the increasing popularity of the fete, saying: “It’s been a 100 per cent year on year growth. In year one, we had an audience of 7,000 people, in year two it went to 14,000, in 2012 there were 1,22,000 footfalls over five days. This year, in the first two days itself, there was a 30 per cent increase on last year’s attendance.” Filmmaker Nasreen Kabir likened the 2009 occasion to a “little village with lots and lots of writers,” while the event in 2013 seemed to her akin to “a super big city, populated by millions.” Sethi, “The Best of Jaipur Literature Festival.” Some Indian-language writers who have appeared and whose work has been discussed in Jaipur are Girish Karnad (Kannada), Sunil Gangopadhyay (Bengali), and Alka Saraogi and Ashok Vajpeyi (Hindi). Sadana, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, 195n1. Thottam, “At India’s Jaipur Literary Festival.” Sen, “You Still Eat with Your Hands?” See Sen’s scathing report (ibid.) on Oprah’s broadcast of her India tour, aired as part of Oprah’s Next Chapter, which included obligatory visits

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

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by the host to the Taj, Bollywood parties, and socializing with wealthy industrialists, along with slum tours in Mumbai guided by Gregory David Roberts, the author of the dubious slum biography Shantaram. Bal, “The Literary Raj.” Ibid. Ibid. Dalrymple, “The Piece You Ran Is Blatantly Racist.” Ibid. Kumar, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Olukotun, “Jaipur Literature Festival.” In the year following Rushdie’s exile from Jaipur, the festival once again became the locus of social rifts, this time over caste. Ashis Nandy’s comment in a session titled “Republic of Ideas,” that the Indian republic’s survival depends on the fact “that most of the corrupt come from the O.B.C. [Other Backward Classes], the S.C.’s [Scheduled Caste], and now increasingly S.T.’s [Scheduled Tribe]” touched off a firestorm. Prashad, “The Riddles of Ashis Nandy.” The case against Nandy was that his views endorse the intractable and injurious nature of caste stereotypes held by elite intelligentsia. Writing in the Hindu, K. Satyanaraya excoriates the sociologist for “reinforc[ing] a stereotypical image of these communities as ‘intolerant’ and ‘undemocratic,’” insisting that, “in the case of the socially stigmatized and marginalized people, references of any broad-brush kind only reinforce stereotypes of these people.” Satyanaraya, “The Question of Casteism.” In contrast, noting that the furor arose in Jaipur, Manu Joseph likened the festival, and by extension India itself, as given to carnivalesque performances of umbrage, writing that “India is a paradise for those who take offense.” Joseph, “A Paradise for Those Who Take Offense.” These characterizations of the Nandy controversy alternately challenge the violent fixity of stereotypical portraits of the marginal in India, or implicate the event itself as a farce that newly perpetuates stereotypes about India for global consumption. See Vijay Prashad’s nuanced dissection of why Nandy’s comments invoked the kind of split between liberal free speech defenders and those sensitive to minority rights in “The Riddles of Ashis Nandy.” Barthes, “Inaugural Lecture,” 461. Pankaj Mishra writes that in the aftermath of the Rushdie scandal, the festival “quickly descended into chaos,” while for Ayush Soni the festival in the aftermath of Nandy’s incendiary comments is described with

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19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

these words: “Crowds, Controversies, Chaos.” Mishra, “Salman Rushdie Falls Victim”; and Soni, “Jaipur Literature Festival.” Remarking on such festivals’ Anglophonic global inflections, Sadana makes the point that “the vast majority of Indian and Indian origin authors at the festival are English-writing ones,” and concludes that “what is significant is that Indian literature in English has become a window—albeit a small one—into other Indian literatures through these festivals.” Sadana, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, 195n1. Quoted in Jha, “The Writer as Critic.” Ghosh, “Festivals and Freedom.” Ibid. Ibid. Dalrymple “Myth and Fiction at the Jaipur Literature Festival.” Quoted in Lahiri, “At Jaipur, More Substance, Less Froth.” Ghoshal, “A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” Anthony Giddens identifies modernity itself as an “enigmatic” condition in which “social relations concern the ‘positioning’ of individuals within a ‘social space’ of symbolic categories and ties.” Giddens, Constitution of Society, 89. The activation of stereotypes by global novels instances such an enigmatic play on the social space occupied by each reader within a symbolic economy invoked by their proximity and difference from points of disenfranchisement around the globe. The notion of “worlding” has a specific critical genealogy in postcolonial thought, and it is this that I mean to evoke here. Gayatri Spivak famously repurposes Heidegger’s use of worlding in “The Origin of the Work of Art” to draw attention to how the third world is invented through representation in imperial canonical literature, which is, according to her, a form of “worlding” that is instantly “forgotten” as invention in order to “expand the empire” of literature as a discipline. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” 243. Edward Said, in The World, The Text, The Critic, has also importantly written of “textual worldiness,” whose connection with literary stereotypes I discuss in more detail in chapter 1. More recently Vilashini Cooppan has noted that postcolonial critics use the terms “world,” “worlding,” and “worldliness” as way to emphasize “coeval” human cultural experiences that the elite European provenance of the term cosmopolitan forecloses (Cooppan, Worlds Within, 3). I discuss the relationship between stereotypes and what Edward Said describes as “textual worldliness” in chapter 1.

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1. WHY THE STEREOTYPE? WHY SOUTH ASIA?

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 127. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 77. Ibid., 66, 80. Nair, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch, 66. Pickering, Stereotyping, xii. John Johnson notes in Typographia, his early history of printing, that “the invention of the Stereotype, like that of Printing is somewhat involved in mystery” (chap. 22, p. 657). Although William Ged is generally accepted as the inventor of this method, there is legitimate evidence suggesting that simultaneous innovations away from the use of movable types toward fixed casts were made by J. Van der Mey and Johannes Muller of Holland as early as 1700, followed by Ged in 1725, and Foulis and Tilloch in 1779. A cheaper and quicker related method, “polytypy,” which used a system of pulleys and die-casts, was invented by François Hoffmann in Paris in 1784, while another called “clicher” was patented and popularized by French printer Firmin Didot in collaboration with Louise-Etienne Herhan in the 1790s. In Britain, Lord Stanhope, working with a printer, Andrew Wilson, under the direction of Foulis and Tilloch, made the technique standard for the Stanhope press in 1803, and subsequently introduced it to Cambridge University Press in 1809. Stereography became widespread in the 1830s when newspapers increased hugely in circulation and began patenting improved methods for printing news columns. Fascinating accounts of the conflicting and uneven spurts by which stereotyping developed in several places at once can be found in The History of Printing; Wilson, Stereotyping and Electrotyping; Hodgson, Essay on the Origin and Progress of Stereotype Printing; and Johnson, Typographia. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 48. See Michael Pickering’s Stereotyping, where he traces the nineteenth century pseudoscientific colonial origins of racialist typing (xii). Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 221. Ibid., 223. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes this pathological definition of the stereotype to H. C. Warren’s Dictionary of Psychology (1934). Stereotypy as invariable, instinctive behavior later gained zoological weight when it was imported in the 1950s and 1960s into the study of animals. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want, 296.

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15. Fanon writes: “Look, a Negro! . . . I couldn’t take it any longer for I already knew that there were legends, stories, histories, and especially . . . historicity. . . . Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro! . . . My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone. . . . The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly.” Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 91–93. This exceptional moment in Fanon’s seminal text on colonial psychology is all about the stereotype. The affective fear produced by the white boy’s racism is first conditioned by his stereotype of blackness based on a fiction of racial otherness he holds in his head. Second, Fanon here implicates racial stereotyping as emblematic of the visual rhetorics always at play in colonial cultures. Finally, the force of Fanon’s outrage derives from his recognition that stereotypes of blackness are aleatory—derogatory one moment, and swiftly complimentary the next—“Look how handsome that Negro is” (ibid., 94), which allows that they be the repository of all manner of narratives, fictions or history. 16. Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype, xviii. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, 191. 19. Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype, 5. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Pickering, Stereotyping, xiv. 23. Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories, 155. 24. Ibid., 145. 25. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. 26. Ibid., 7. 27. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 98. 28. Our reliance on stereotypes, Lippmann writes, “precedes the use of reason; is a form of perception, imposes a certain character on the data of our senses before the data can reach intelligence.” Ibid., 98. 29. Ibid., 81. 30. Ibid. Also quoted in Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype. 31. In particular, Lippmann gives the example of “Americanization” as “the substitution of American for European stereotypes.” Ibid., 85. 32. Lippmann extends the terrain of culture from which stereotypes derive: “The stereotyped shapes lent to the world come not merely from art, . . . but from our moral codes and our social philosophies, and our political agitations as well.” Ibid., 84, 85. 33. Ibid., 90.

238 1.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

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Ibid., 90–91. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 96. Ibid. Dyer, The Matter of Images, 16. Also quoted in Rosello, Declining the Stereotype, and Chow, The Protestant Ethnic. Ibid., 14. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 95. Lippmann’s conviction that stereotypes are integral to our social formations is so resolute that his pragmatism veers toward the absurd when he tries to think of a way out of the bind that prejudicial or false stereotypes pose. Lippmann suggests appointing Orwellian teams of bias-free experts bestowed with bureaucratic authority to determine whether this or that stereotype is factual or entirely prejudicial or fictitious (ibid., 375). Lippmann essentially argues for the establishment of rationalized intelligence communities to influence American public and policy opinions (ibid., 379). Rosello, Declining the Stereotype, 29. Jameson, “On ‘Cultural Studies,’” 33. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 35. Ibid. Bourdieu, Distinction, 3. Ibid., 26–27. Rosello, Declining the Stereotype, 35. Genette, Palimpsests, 79. Ibid., 78. Ibid. Genette similarly analyzes Flaubert’s stereotypical language, insisting that his prose is overridden by a “banality of metaphors” that is stereotypical, and not the kind of “beautiful metaphor” that spurns the mundane connotations of the stereotypical (ibid., 109. Riffaterre, Essais de stylistique structurale, 171. Also quoted in Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype. Riffaterre makes the argument that stereotypical clichés emerge as stylistic forms of language: “It’s important to stress that the stereotype alone does not make a cliché. It’s still necessary that the customary verbal expression have an element of style, whether it be a metaphor like ‘a human anthill,’ an antithesis like ‘juridical murder,’ a hyperbole like ‘mortal anxiety,’ etc. All stylistic categories are susceptible of becoming part of clichés.” Ibid., 163. Cited in the original French by Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype.

1. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

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Barthes, Roland Barthes (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1977), 89. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 42. Ibid., 43. Barthes advocates, tongue-in-cheek, that we have a new study of language as a science of stereotyping: “It would be good to imagine a new linguistic science that would no longer study the origin of words, or etymology, or even their densification throughout historical discourse; this science would doubtless be subversive, manifesting much more than the historical origin of truth: its rhetorical, languaging nature.” Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 43. Of course, this “languaging” of truth that occurs in and through stereotypes reveals “truth” understood in a Nietzschean sense, as “only the solidification of old metaphors” (ibid.). Barthes, Lecon, 15. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 27. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 18. Pickering, Stereotyping, 39. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 18. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 19. Chow, Protestant Ethnic, 59. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 18. Ibid. Chow, Protestant Ethnic, 103. Said, Orientalism, 58. Ibid., 26. I don’t find it useful to write a brief on the shortcomings of Orientalism, not because Said’s analytic is beyond reproach but because these arguments have already been eloquently made by others who have understandably critiqued the seemingly limitless reach of Orientalism as a discourse, Said’s belief in humanism, the lack of gender analysis, and the overreliance on Foucaultian notions of power and knowledge in Said’s work, and so on. For example, Benita Parry finds Said’s Orientalism as discourse too all-encompassing in “arrogating the right to represent what is beyond Europe’s borders,” so that Said’s formidable readings of texts remain “indifferent to textual gaps, indeterminacies and contradictions”; Robert Young finds Said’s ideas about Orientalism “repeating the very structures that he censures”; Aijaz Ahmad sharply critiques the

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76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85.

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incompatibility between Said’s Auerbachian humanism, his misuse of Gramsci and Marxism, and his reliance on Foucault’s notions of disciplinary modernity in “Orientalism and After”; and Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg usefully explain the various critical responses to the book. Parry, “Overlapping Territories,” 26; Young, Colonial Desire, 127; Ahmad, In Theory; and Mani and Frankenberg, “The Challenge of Orientalism.” Said, Orientalism, 201. Ibid., 203. Ibid. Said quotes Nietzsche here. Ibid., 204. In Culture and Imperialism, Said unravels the dominative and subversive dimensions of canonical imperial texts through “contrapuntal readings” that are attuned to a text’s various narrative and cultural registers. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 66. Said, Orientalism, 205. Ibid. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 4. Gayatri Spivak credits Said’s Orientalism with ushering in the kind of colonial discourse analysis in the academy that has made “marginality” a problematic, though necessary, commonplace for thinking about problems of exclusion. As Spivak notes in “Marginality in the Teaching Machine,” works such as Said’s have “blossomed into a garden where the marginal can speak, and be spoken, and even spoken for. It is an important part of the discipline now” (62). Despite critiques of Orientalism, it is avowedly formative for certain kinds of textual readings made under the sign of the postcolonial that have gained ground within literary and cultural studies. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 35. Elsewhere Said distinguishes the critic’s judgment from the worldly dynamics he or she attaches to texts, writing: “Moreover a critic may often be, but is not merely, the alchemical translator of texts into circumstantial reality or worldliness; for he too is subject to and a producer of circumstances, and these are felt regardless of whatever objectivity his method possesses. Texts have ways of existing, both theoretical and practical, that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place and society—in short, they are in the world, and hence are worldly.” Said, “The Text, the World, the Critic,” 4. Hence the worlding of texts involves an interpretive act that exceeds specialized critical knowledge to popular modes of identification and reading impelled by the narrative for its most generic readers. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 67.

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86. Gilman’s understanding of how stereotypes mediate self–other relations is psychoanalytic, invoking a language of loss and anxiety to demonstrate its centrality to the consolidation of every subject’s ego: “We project that anxiety onto the Other, externalizing our loss of control. The Other is thus stereotyped, labeled with a set of signs paralleling (or mirroring) our loss of control.” Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 20. Rey Chow focuses on the interethnicity of stereotyping as an act through which “the other is imagined and transformed into a (sur)face.” Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 66. 87. An individual’s confrontation with a stereotype is constrained by her own histories, experiences, memories. Ruth Amossy is on point when she writes that “the stereotype stands at the junction of text and reading. It is necessarily reliant on an aesthetics of reception.” Amossy and Heidingsfeld, “Stereotypes and Representation in Fiction,” 690. Amossy’s analysis of what she calls “stereotyped reading” forwards a reader response theory based on the notion that every reader brings to a text a set of preacquired cognitive patterns that the author must engage and anticipate. Amossy’s suggestion that stereotypes engage readers is crucial; however, I don’t see their cognitive force in quite as scripted a way as Amossy suggests with her theory. 88. Dyer, The Matter of Images, 12. Also quoted in Rosello, Declining the Stereotype, and Chow, The Protestant Ethnic. 89. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 80. 90. Ibid., 86. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., 83. 93. Ibid., 67. 94. Ibid., 66. 95. Ibid., 66, 70. 96. Ibid., 71. 97. Ibid., 77. 98. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want, 296. 99. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 70. 100. Ibid., 82. 101. Ibid., 70, 72. 102. Ibid., 74. 103. Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, 12. 104. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 74. 105. See Anne McClintok’s Imperial Leather and Ann Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power for excellent analysis of how stereotypes of the

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colonized as feminine, savage, lazy, lusty, and so on, produced the gendered fetishes, intimacies, and disparages of imperial power in South Africa and Indonesia, respectively. Robert Young’s Colonial Desire also importantly traces European colonial “links between sex and race” in the nineteenth century as based on “fantasies derived from cultural stereotypes” of blackness as representing a simultaneously “attractive, but dangerous, sexuality” (97). 106. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 76. 107. Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 66. 108. See Unthinking Eurocentrism, by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam; Fiction in the Age of Photography, by Nancy Armstrong; What Do Pictures Want, by W. J. T. Mitchell; and Film and Stereotype, by Jorg Schweinitz. 109. Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, 3. 110. Ibid., 4. 111. Ibid., 31. 112. Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 52. 113. Ibid., 107. 114. Ibid., 104. 115. Ibid., 107. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid., 116. 118. Ibid., 51. 119. Rosello, Declining the Stereotype, 32. Also quoted in Chow, The Protestant Ethnic. 120. Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 54. 121. Walkowitz, “Comparison Literature,” 571. 122. Notably, the debate between Chinua Achebe’s polemical defense of English as an African language, Ngugi’s rejection of it, and E. K. Brathwaite’s celebration of creolization in the Caribbean, what he terms “nation language” (Achebe, “The African Writer”; Ngugi, Decolonising the Mind; and Brathwaite, “History of the Voice”). See also Rushdie’s championing of English as the language of Indian syncreticism in Imaginary Homelands; Gauri Viswanathan’s analysis of English education in the Indian colonies in Masks of Conquest; and Priya Joshi’s In Another Country for a fascinating account for the rise and popular appropriation of the English novel by India’s reading public. 123. Jay, The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, 25–26. 124. Gandhi, “Hindi,” 396. 125. For a fuller discussion of nationalist attitudes toward English in India, including Gandhi’s influence on other significant figures such as Nehru,

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Rajendra Prasad, Maulana Azad, see Das Gupta, Language Conflict and National Development. Gandhi’s more extensive address of this question is in Thoughts on National Language. 126. Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity, Christopher Lane’s The Ruling Passion, Jenny Sharpe’s Allegories of Empire, Robert Young’s Colonial Desire, and Ann Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power offer various critical perspectives on the ties between colonialism, power and gender typing. 127. For more on M.  K. Gandhi’s self-claimed effeminacy, see Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 49. See also L. Gandhi, “Loving Well.” 128. Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education (1835),” 237. 129. Ibid., 230. 130. The global resonances of Gandhian passivity are well documented. See Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy for a discussion of the symmetry and alliances between Gandhian masculinity as a model of tolerance and forbearance and the forms of tolerant and nonaggressive masculinities modeled by the likes of Wilde and Forster that challenged the forcefulness of English imperialism from within the imperial center. Leela Gandhi’s “Concerning Violence” critiques Gandhi’s performance of effeminism and its effect on consolidating certain discriminatory gender attitudes against women. Sudarshan Kapur’s Raising Up a Prophet is a study of Gandhi’s global influence on the African American civil rights struggle, and Vijay Prashad’s Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting draws parallels between Gandhi and Marcus Garvey, both biographically and in terms of their political strategies for resisting oppression. That Gandhi’s cosmopolitanism is bound up in his correspondence with Tolstoy (his reading of Tolstoy’s Kingdom of God and Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” while imprisoned in South Africa), and his dialogues with Theosophist Annie Besant is common knowledge. See especially David Hardiman’s Gandhi in His Time and Ours. 131. Mayo, Mother India, 78. 132. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a rare example, along with Anuradha Roy’s An Atlas of Impossible Longing, of recent novels that take up the concerns with caste. These novels articulate the persistence of caste differences in India as a consequence, however paradoxical it might seem, of modernization. For Velutha in God of Small Things, Mukunda in Atlas of Impossible Longing, and Bakha in Untouchable, modernity, signaled by India’s postcolonial rise as a global power, tragically exacerbates the outcast’s mistreatment. This point rehearses

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Nicholas Dirks’s argument that “caste, as we know it today, is not in fact some unchanged survival of ancient India, not some single system that reflects a core civilizational value, not a basic expression of Indian tradition. Rather  .  .  . caste is a modern phenomenon, that it is, specifically, a product of an historical encounter between India and Western colonial rule. Dirks, Castes of Mind, 5. In The Caste Question, Anupama Rao brilliantly illustrates the complexity of Dalit struggles for political recognition alongside and against the state as part of India’s practice of democracy. Because the caste problem is so mired in complex religious, legal, and cultural entanglements, it projects a popular stereotype all its own about India’s unique atavism in the West. However, with the exception of the novels cited here, it is notable that caste representations don’t translate easily for a global readership, and novels focused on caste questions have rarely garnered global acclaim. Even translated works in Dalit literature, such as Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan (translated in 2003) remain localized outside of the Anglophone canon as a subgenre that is decidedly not global. For this reason, I do not deal explicitly with the problematic of caste stereotypes in South Asian novels in this book. Contentious efforts to articulate caste discrimination as worldwide race and human rights problems are ongoing but have not as yet received popular traction. See, for example, Visvanathan, “The Race for Caste”; and Naunidhi Kaur, “Caste and Race.” 133. Prominent vernacular treatments of Gandhism are Premchand’s Hindi novel, Rangabhumi, the later Marathi plays, Gandhi Ani Ambedkar by Chetan Datar, and Mi Nathuram Godse Bolto by Pradeep Dalvi. Gandhi’s relationships with Indian writers such as Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, and Subramamiam Bharathi are also notable in terms of his wider influence on Indian literary production. 134. Mukerjee, The Twice Born Fiction, 61. 135. R. K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) satirizes the ineffectual conversion of Sriram to Gandhianism to impress and attract Bharati, an impassioned Gandhian. The novel culminates in their recognition of mutual desire against the background violence of India’s Partition. Other works of Partition literature that consider the sudden eruption of violence also take a critical view of Gandhian passivity. Of note are Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956); Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988); and Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988). Aside from these Anglophone contexts, writers such as Saadat Hasan Manto (in Urdu) and Jyotirmoyee Devi (in Bengali) have been prolific about

2.

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questioning the complicity of stereotypes of non-violence with massive communal violence of Partition. 136. See Devji, Terrorist in Search of Humanity. 137. Rushdie, “On Gandhi.” 138. Orwell, Burmese Days, 103, 106. 139. Hardt, Multitude, 193, 197. 140. Davis, Planet of Slums, 178. 141. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 40. 142. Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 5. 2. TO UNDERSTAND ME, YOU’LL HAVE TO SWALLOW A WORLD

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

See Benedict Anderson’s definition of a nation as an “imagined, horizontal, community” in Imagined Communities. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 27. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children. Midnight’s Children was twice judged the Best of Booker: in 1993 and 2008. Influential readings of Rushdie’s work that address these constellations are Kumkum Sangari’s “The Politics of the Possible”; Gayatri Spivak’s “Reading the Satanic Verses”; Keith Wilson’s “Midnight’s Children and Reader Responsibility”; M. Keith Booker’s “Midnight’s Children, History and Complexity”; Bishnupriya Ghosh’s “An Invitation to Indian Postmodernity”; Vijay Mishra’s “Postcolonial Differend”; Timothy Brennan’s Salman Rushdie and the Third World; Uma Parameswaran’s “Handcuffed to History”; and Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 216. Ibid. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 12. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 216. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 8. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 394. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 200. Ibid. Mikics, “Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier,” 382. Rushdie, “Midnight’s Children and Shame,” 11. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 3. Jameson, “On Magical Realism in Film,” 311. Ibid., 303.

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19. This difference between major and minor histories are akin to the difference Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies between History 1, dominant histories that “belong to capital” and are commensurate with its project of liberalization, and History 2, histories that may be produced by capital but remain recalcitrant to its “life processes.” Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 50. 20. Jameson, “On Magical Realism,” 302. William Spindler makes distinctions between three modes of magical realism: metaphysical (which has an emphasis on the supernatural and transcendental), anthropological (which plays rational and magical fictions against one another), and ontological (which is concerned with the subjective experiences linked to the former). See Spindler, “Magic Realism.” 21. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 136. 22. Slemon, “Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 420. In Slemon’s view, magical realisms as a form of postcolonial discourse “comprise a positive and liberating engagement with the codes of imperial history and its legacy of fragmentation and discontinuity” (422). 23. Bhabha, “Introduction,” in Nation and Narration, 7. 24. Hardt and Negri’s notion of multitudes as singular plural comes from Spinoza’s ideas about individual multiplicities to conceptualize the “multitudos.” See Etienne Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics. 25. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 99, 159. 26. Ibid., 105. 27. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 204. 28. My use of “Empire” is meant to denote the imperial formations of late capital that Hardt and Negri argue are no longer conditioned on the prominence of national ideologies alone. Rather, as they argue, “Empire” is to be conceptualized as the reinvention of political space such that imperium now operates in the most banal and ubiquitous ways to shore up liberalism’s false promises that serve to only proliferate absolute social inequity across the globe. In this account, the multitude appears as the equally present form of resistance that is everywhere recalcitrant to the working of Empire. 29. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 3. 30. Ibid., 143. 31. Ibid., 525. 32. Ibid., 3. 33. Ibid., 272. 34. Ibid., 272–73.

2. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

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Ibid., 306. Ibid., 307. Sangari, “The Politics of the Possible,” 160. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 436–37. Ibid., 272. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 207. Amir Mufti’s essay “Reading the Rushdie Affair” analyzes the influence of Nehruvian politics on Rushdie’s critique of Indian nationalist politics. While Mufti reads Rushdie as offering an auto-critique, an attempt to “dislodge the authority” of a nationalist narrative from “within,” my argument takes this as the given in Rushdie’s prose so as to trace the effacements that happen when making such an internalized critique. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 307, 306. Ibid., 307. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 96. Mufti, “Reading the Rushdie Affair,” 57. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 517. Ibid., 525. Mufti, “Reading the Rushdie Affair,” 56. As Rushdie is well aware, his ambivalent portrait of India in Midnight’s Children began because, as he says, “I realized how much I wanted to restore the past to myself. . . . I who had been away so long . . . was gripped by the conviction that I, too, had a city and a history to reclaim.” Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 9–10. This nostalgia, far from merely a critical impulse, governs the skeleton of his narrative, making possible a critique that targets the complicity of his own class in the nation’s making but fails nevertheless to decenter the narrative away from the preoccupations of this class. Saleem, he writes, “is no dispassionate, disinterested chronicler. He wants so to shape his material that the reader is forced to concede his central role. He is cutting up history to suit himself ” (24). Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 552. Sangari, “The Politics of the Possible,” 168. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 192. Ibid., 145. For critical appraisals of Empire, see Balakrishnan, “Hardt and Negri’s Empire,” and Munck, “Review of Hardt and Negri’s Empire,” among others. Balakrishnan, “Hardt and Negri’s Empire,” 356–59.

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56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

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Hardt and Negri, Empire, 402, 402–3, 410. Ibid., 402–3. Ibid., 410. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 362. On the local and its connection to the multitude, Hardt and Negri write: “The concept of the local . . . need not be defined by isolation and purity. In fact, if one breaks down the walls that surround the local . . . one can link it directly to the universal. The concrete universal is what allows the multitude to pass from place to place” (ibid.). The dismissal of the local can only happen once the authors have posited “reproduction” as a universal value in its place. What the multitude theorists pose in a sense of aufhebung is a commonplace displacement of particularities—nation, race, ethnicity— with a universal, stereotypical “sexuality” that cannot risk the fractures of (sexual) difference. Ibid., 394–95. Marx, Capital, 1:711. Marx, Capital, 3:959. See, in particular, chap. 48. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 403. Ibid., 403. Marx, Capital, 2:471. For Althusser and Balibar, the transition between simple and extended reproduction in Marx is ultimately a “fictive choice” where the stakes are determined structurally by the capitalization of the products the laborer makes and remakes and the capitalist buys and sells. In this sense, reproduction is biopolitical because it expands the repetitive and continual process of production, a process of synchronic dependencies that determine how both the capitalist and the laborers live in relation to one another (Reading Capital, 292). See especially chap. 3 of Reading Capital; and Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 101. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 125. It is relevant that Nehru was Gandhi’s favored candidate for the post of first prime minister of India. For an excellent analysis of Nehru’s postcolonial politics of compromise and negotiation, see Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 457–58. As Shahid Amin notes, Gandhi’s transformation into the Mahatma, or into “the Mahatma image,” remains one of the most iconic examples of how the subcontinent’s symbolic economy for autonomy has come to be apprehended as a

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74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83.

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stereotype (Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma,” 289). Amin writes of the “fictions” of Gandhi that circulated orally in anticolonial India, “manufacturing his reputation” through “rumors” about the transference of his charisma to local actors of the struggle; the miraculous, magical, and even occult powers of Gandhi’s touch and words; and the absolute purity of his person (see esp. 310–48). It is this likeness between Saleem and the Mahatma image that Rushdie evokes. Ibid. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 471. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 48. Gandhi, “Loving Well,” 93. Leela Gandhi cites the following by Gandhi to show how his “aversion to sexuality” is crystallized in his opposition to marriage as a violent institution: “Young men in India . . . are married early. . . . Nobody tells them to exercise restraint in married life. Parents are impatient to see grandchildren. The poor girl wives are expected by their surroundings to bear children as fast as they can” (ibid). Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 495, 481. Saleem, notably, feels responsible for Nehru’s death. Ibid., 334. Ibid., 523. Ibid., 493. Ibid. 339. India does have a significant legacy of Fanon-style revolutionaries who opposed colonialism for years before the noncooperation movement took hold; Tatya Tope, Bhagat Singh, Khudiram Bose, Netaji Subhas Bose, and countless others advocated, organized, and fought violently against the British. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 358. Shiva, along with Indira, and Sanjay, are fixated by power, money, and poverty in Midnight’s Children. Shiva berates Saleem’s plan for a third principle: “No little rich boy; there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty, and have-and-lack . . . the world is things. Things and their makers rule the world. . . . For things, the country is run. Not for people. For things, America and Russia send aid. . . . When you have things, then there is time to dream; when you don’t, you fight” (307). This is a rather bleak commentary by Rushdie on the cynicism and desperation with which neo-imperialist trends are being negotiated within India. Ibid., 525. In Event, Memory, Metaphor, Shahid Amin explores the overlay between Gandhian nonviolent ideologies and violent forms of nationalism that

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are recuperated in how the postcolonial nation commemorates the insurgency at Chauri Chaura, where a group of Gandhian activists burned down a colonial police station in 1922. The event, as Amin notes, is historically legible only as it is variously (mis)remembered in terms of the failure of nonviolent action, and in the affirmation of violent revolution. 84. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 189. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., 194, 197. 87. Ibid., 189. 88. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 222. 89. Ibid., 223. 90. Ibid., 225. 91. Rushdie, “Rushdie, in Conversation with Gunter Grass,” 58. 92. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 8. 93. For a discussion of the effeminate Bengali Babu stereotype in the Indian colonial context, see Mrinalini Sinha’s introduction to her book, Colonial Masculinity. For related discussions of homosexuality and hypermasculinity within Indian nationalism, see Chari, “Colonial Fantasies and Postcolonial Identities,” and Gandhi, “Concerning Violence. 94. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 45. 95. Ibid., 47. 96. Ibid., 47–48. 97. Ibid., 47. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Brennan, “Cultural Politics of Rushdie Criticism,” 110. 101. Fewer others, such as Sara Suleri, have argued that Rushdie has adequately resolved the women’s question in his work. See Suleri, “Whither Rushdie?” 102. Spivak, “Reading the Satanic Verses,” 223. 103. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 115, 260. 104. Ibid., 135. 105. Ibid., 547. 106. Ibid., 231–32, 502. 107. Ibid., 495. 108. Ibid., 489, 525. 109. See Grewal, “Salman Rushdie.” 110. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 229, 483.

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111. Ibid., 483. 112. Ibid., 251. Toward the end of the novel we are given another similar view into this factory run by women when Saleem returns to confront the “grim, defensive, obstinate Padma”: “I walked north north north . . . to where . . . vats bubble, and strong-armed women tell bawdy jokes; to this world of sharp-lipped overseers with conical breasts, and the allpervasive clank of pickle-jars” (ibid., 545). 113. Spivak, “Reading the Satanic Verses,” 222. 114. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 474. 115. Ibid., 475. 116. Ibid., 476. 117. Ibid. 118. Booker, “Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity, 301–2. 119. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 477. 120. In his sympathetic appraisal of Rushdie, Brennan notes: “Rushdie’s fiction . . . dealt with working-class life warmly and compassionately but always in a comic register.” Brennan, “The Cultural Politics,” 125. 121. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 189. 122. Ibid., 189, 194. 123. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 129–30. 124. That interpellation works as a mode of social surveillance has been famously shown by Althusser in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Like other ideological apparatuses—the school, church, family— the global novel too is a mode of interpellation or hailing that regulates social sentiments. 3. SLUMDOG OR WHITE TIGER?

1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

Slumdog Millionaire is an adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A. Swarup, Q & A, 1. Ibid., 275. Fierce bids by Penguin, HarperCollins, and others caused an auction fever over The White Tiger at the London Book Fair. Slumdog Millionaire cost $14 million to make but grossed more than $141 million in the first year of its release, going on to win four Golden Globes, seven Baftas, and eight Oscars. Giridharadas’s review emphasizes the film’s reworking of slum life in terms of “self-making” and industriousness that appeals specifically to liberal audiences: “It portrays a changing India . . . a land of self-makers,

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

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where a scruffy son of the slums can, solely of his own effort, hoist himself up, flout his origins, break with fate.” Adiga, The White Tiger, 11, 4. Bauman, Globalization, 97–98. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 97–98. It is notable that, unlike Slumdog, most other films about slum life in India are starkly realist. Indeed, slum films increasingly adopt the generic conventions of ethnographic documentaries in order to convey a heightened sense of verism (as in Dhobi Ghat, Salaam Bombay!, Born into Brothels, etc.) in their depiction of dirth. Echoing the social realism of early Anglophone Indian novels, filmic representations of poverty render material need in terms that are at once naturalistic and melodramatic. It is this element of melodramatic transcendence associated with slums that Slumdog transforms into the very different generic conventions of fantastic realism commonly associated with tropes of excess that figure Bollywood romance. See also popular works such as Dominique Lapierre’s The City of Joy, the notorious fictional memoir Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, and Katherine Boo’s travelogue of Annawadi slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Anjaria and Anjaria, “Slumdog Millionaire and Epistemologies of the City,” 43. Chandra, “Slumlord Aesthetics.” Adiga, The White Tiger, 36. Ibid., frontmatter. Medintz, “India’s Native Son.” Turpin, “White Tiger.” Kipling, The City of Dreadful Night, 72. Bauman, Globalization, 81–83. Bauman quotes Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen’s framing of ideal consumption in terms of desire: “Desire does not desire satisfaction. To the contrary, desire desires desire” (ibid., 83). As Žižek shows, this idea of desire as self-perpetuating expresses symbolic relations to lack rather than real relations to an object that might fulfill desire. Desire of the aspirational kind aligned with slums proceeds through fantasy. See Žižek’s Looking Awry for elaboration of fantasy’s centrality to desire. See Nandini Chandra’s article on Slumdog, which likens scenes from the film that seem “packaged for a poverty tour,” such as “the one where

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24. 25.

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Shantaram took Angelina Jolie by the hand and led her through the giddy lanes of Dharavi.” Chandra, “Slumlord Aesthetics.” Nuttall and Mbembe, “A Blasé Attitude,” 194. The authors describe the modern landscape of Johannesburg to which the entire edition of Public Culture is devoted. Roy, “Slumdog Cities,” 224. The equation of slums with the megacity, Roy notes, extends to the whole postcolonial nation (227). Thinkers who see slums very differently in terms of the problems they pose for modern development have similar assumptions linking slums to the third world. See Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums; Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital; and Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities. Davis, Planet of Slums, 19, 2–5. Writing about indigence and poverty in “Can the Indigent Speak,” Barbara Korte asks: “Do Adiga and other novelists ‘steal’ stories from the poor when they write about them? Do they ‘ventriloquise’ for them or commit acts of ethically suspicious class ‘passing’ of the kind George Orwell is associated with in British literature? Are literary treatments of poverty a fictional equivalent to ‘slum tourism’” (295)? Prouty, “The Aesthetics of Misery.” Prouty does not see the film as merely poverty exploitation. He concludes that “Boyle has created a world that is both an exotic elsewhere and uncannily familiar.” Rushby, “Review: The White Tiger.” Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian points to a similar conflict between the literary text, the accolades its author receives, and the subaltern scenes and subjects the novel represents. He asks, “But isn’t there a problem: Adiga might come across as a literary tourist ventriloquising others’ suffering and stealing their miserable stories to fulfill his literary ambitions?” Jeffries, “Roars of Anger.” Controversy over the film was fueled by high-profile disputes. Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan, whose celebrity the film parodies—he appears as a looming, unseen figure in one scene and is the real-life host of the game show that is spoofed—took umbrage at the film’s focus on slums, writing, “if SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations (quoted in Ramesh, “Bollywood Icon”). Simon Beaufoy, the film’s scriptwriter, fired back that he was “puzzled that he [Bachchan] would say that. Of course there is brutal stuff in there, but he can’t say any of that doesn’t happen. None of it is made up. . . . I depicted the place as I found it, really. I wandered around the

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29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

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slums for weeks, talking to people. It was very important to me to spend time there because you can’t just parachute in as the middle class white guy and say, ‘Line up the slum kids’” (quoted in Singh, “Slumdog Millionaire Writer”). This debate encapsulates the problem of voyeurism and cultural belonging that slum stereotypes designed for consumption by an affluent, global audience are mired in. See Gehlawat, The “Slumdog” Phenomenon. Miles, “Shocked by Slumdog’s Poverty Porn.” Miles identifies the capacity of stereotypes to expose the desires and fears of those who perpetrate and consume them. She writes, “Boyle’s most subversive achievement may lie not in revealing the dark underbelly of India—but in revealing ours.” Magnier, “Indians Don’t Feel Good.” For an influential account of how sovereignty, governmentality, and biopolitics are mutually constituted by modern states, see Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population and Society Must Be Defended. Foucault, “Power/Knowledge,” 155. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. The case of Rubina Ali, the girl who portrays Latika, reveals how seemingly benign global representations of slum life are ensnared within a material politics with complex ethical entanglements. Rubina, reportedly underpaid for her work, appeared at the Oscars—her first trip out of India—and was subsequently put up “for sale” by her father. Rubina’s slum, Garib Nagar, burned down and she was temporarily homeless. She is slated to play a minor Bollywood role and has published an autobiography, Slumgirl Dreaming (2009). Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 98, 101. Clifford reads Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific as a classic example of “emersion anthropology” (ibid., 98). Remote fieldwork differing from newer practices that are often urban focus on the heterogeneity of informants and attend to the transience of anthropological encounters. Elsewhere he gives a fuller picture of the ways in which modern forms of travel—including virtual ones—collapse prior ideas of cultural difference. “‘Cultural’ difference,” Clifford writes, “is no longer a stable exotic otherness; self-other relations are a matter of power and rhetoric rather than of essence. A whole structure of expectations about authenticity in culture and in art is thrown in doubt” (Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 14). Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 98.

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37. Ibid., 110. In describing the second mode of ethnography that “dwells in travel,” Clifford gives examples of “dialogic realism” from films such as Joe Leahy’s Neighbors and Jaguar (102). 38. Adiga, The White Tiger, 11. 39. Ibid., frontmatter. 40. Ibid., 216. 41. Balram repeatedly emphasizes his perception of India as a divided nation. He claims, “I am in the light now, but I was born and raised in darkness.” Adiga, The White Tiger, 11. And later, “These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat or get eaten up.” Ibid., 54. Social separations between the rural and urban, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, maintain the calculus of difference by which slums are viewed as abject. 42. “India Shining” was the failed slogan that the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party advanced in the 2004 elections as part of their campaign showcasing India’s prosperity in the global market following vast deregulation measures. 43. Adiga, The White Tiger, 101. 44. Ibid., 99. 45. The slum stereotype is sublimely ideological in the sense described by Žižek, in that slums overcome their phenomenological significance as locations. The novel’s continual reference to them, including Balram’s fear and fascination with slums, produces his desire to be identified with it while investing libidinally in its opposite, namely capital. For more on the connection between the sublime as a noumenal dimension of any stereotype (the people, nation, slums, etc.), and its political force, see Žižek’s Sublime Object of Ideology. 46. In scene after scene, we find descriptions along these lines: “One beggar was carrying another on his shoulders and going from car to car; the fellow on his shoulders had no legs below his knees. . . . The fellow without the legs was moaning and groaning, the other fellow tapping and scratching on the windows of the car” (205). Such scenes compound the fear that haunts Balram, that ultimately “the best case scenario” for him may be “a small home in some slum” (171). 47. For critiques of colonialism’s progress narratives, see Anne McClintock’s “The Angel of Progress”; Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe; and Fisher-Tiné and Mann, Colonialism as Civilizing Mission. 48. Nandy, Secret Politics of Our Desires, 3.

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49. Daniel Brook describes the briskness with which luxury skyscrapers are being built in the midst of slums. Slum inhabitants are coerced and bribed to relocate to substandard habitations as a consequence of the land reform act championed in Mumbai by right-wing Hindutva politico Bal Thackeray. This form of aggravated development is in line with the type of capitalization of poverty de Soto advocates. See Brook, “Slumdogs, Millionaires.” 50. Slums are described in natural terms with organic metaphors to make them sublime. In a Kantian sense, they overwhelm the imaginative faculty of those who see them and implicate observers in a sense of their own inferiority because of the fear and pain they generate. At the same time, these sublime stereotypes “inspire satisfaction” by returning the confounded self to an assurance that reason is the better faculty (Kant, Critique of Judgement, 101, 108–9). 51. Adiga, The White Tiger, 101, 103. 52. Ibid., 98. 53. Ibid., 107. 54. Ibid., 116. 55. Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” 36. In anthropology, the figure of the native, Appadurai argues, has become a substitute for primitivism. The native informant stands for people who are “incarcerated” or “confined” to their cultures (37). It is this fixed idea of the native without social or physical mobility that Balram represents and violently circumvents. 56. Adiga, The White Tiger, 1. On the point about novelistic dialogism, see Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination. 57. Davis, Planet of Slums, 9. 58. Fanon has theorized the revolutionary potential of violence in the colonial context, writing that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.” Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 35. Balram’s violence appears to be revolutionary but does not break down and rearrange existing social structures. 59. Adiga, The White Tiger, 104. 60. Holgate, “The Words on the Street.” 61. A well-known newspaper editorial links the film’s appeal to Western audiences with Adiga’s novel: “It is undoubtedly the [film’s] setting—the wretched slums of Mumbai . . . that has caught the imagination of audiences. The miserable existence of the average slum dweller, which we in India know so well, is novel to the western viewer. . . . Indeed, the awarding

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63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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of the Booker prize to the novel The White Tiger shows that the seamier side of the Indian dream continues to have a resonance in western sensibilities” (“Slumdog Saga,” Daily News and Analysis, January 13, 2009, http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/editorial-slumdog-saga-1221082). Anjaria and Anjaria identify the “Disneyesque neoclassical residential fantasy” slum conversion project shown in the film as Powai, a location easily recognizable to Mumbaikars. Anjaria and Anjaria, “Slumdog Millionaire and Epistemologies,” 42. Slumdog Millionaire. Chandra, “Slumlord Aesthetics.” Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 835. Ibid., 837. Ibid., 843. Ibid., 836. See Jigna Desai’s “Pulp Frictions,” where she discusses the “pulp orientalism” or “re-orientalism” of the film. Giridharadas, “Horatio Alger Relocates to a Mumbai Slum.” Feminist cinema theory interrogates the pleasure of the dominant, patriarchal gaze by considering struggles over processes of identification, alienation, and motivation for looking that occur between spectator and film. This struggle organizes the split between fetishistic scopophilia and epistemophilia (what Mulvey terms “curiosity”) as the pleasure drives of cinema. See Mulvey’s Fetishism and Curiosity and Miriam Hansen’s Babel and Babylon. The play of fetishistic pleasure in defining cinema’s power carries over to films that map global desires in a world of uneven capitalism. Meschkank, “Investigations into Slum Tourism.” Meschkank connects the burgeoning tourist fascination with slums to “the desire of tourists for matching images spread by the media with real experience” (52). See the Reality Tours and Travel website, http://www.realitytoursandtravel.com/slumtours.html. Slum tours are popular tourist attractions in many cities of the global south, including Rio de Janeiro’s Rocinha favela, Johannesburg’s Soweto township, and Jakarta’s kampungs as well as in Manila and Mexico City. The practice of looking at the poor, Meschkank observes, is a revival of nineteenth-century practices by the upper-middle class in London and New York of touring “poorer quarters” (“Investigations into Slum Tourism,” 47). Freire-Medeiros, “The Favela and Its Touristic Transits,” 580.

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75. Reality Tours and Travel, http://www.realitytoursandtravel.com/slumtours.html. Echoing de Soto, the tour organizers tout that “Dharavi’s industries have an annual turnover of approximately US$665 million.” 76. Ibid. 77. This claim is endorsed by Conde Nast Traveler, Smithsonian magazine, Frommers, Rough Guide, and Daily Telegraph (UK). 78. These associations are commonplace of nineteen-century novels, such as Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Bleak House. See also Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, 22. 79. The UN definition of slums eliminates psychosocial associations, defining “a slum as a contiguous settlement where the inhabitants are characterized as having inadequate housing and basic services. A slum is often not recognized and addressed by the public authorities as an integral or equal part of the city” (UN-Habitat 2003, chap. 1, p. 10). The UN’s institutional focus makes slums zones of physical, spatial, and legal lack that need operational, quantitative, and policy interventions to mitigate poverty. 80. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 35. 81. See Freud’s Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. Hans’s phobia is a complex of transference, projection, and desire substitution enmeshed in Freud’s and Hans’s father’s acceptance of Oedipal law. 82. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 35, 38. 83. Ibid., 34–46. 84. Ibid., 45. 85. Ibid., 4. 86. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 2. 87. Ibid., 3. 88. A bestseller, The Big Necessity is a book about public sanitation around the world, emphasizing its lack in the third world. George describes a visit to a slum in India: “The four thousand people who live in Shanti Nagar share the facilities of one community toilet block which has twenty-six stalls. . . . Shanti Nagar is definitely a slum, because to live in a slum is to live amid shit, and it has plenty of it.” George, The Big Necessity, 201. 89. The depiction of slum life encased by filth is true to the novel Q & A, which Slumdog adapts. Q & A portrays Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s main slums as “the swampy urban wasteland”: “Dharavi’s grim landscape of urban squalor deadens and debases us. Its open drains teem with mosquitoes. Its stinking, excrement-lined communal latrines are full of rats. . . . Mounds of filthy garbage lie on every corner, from which

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ragpickers still manage to find something useful. . . . For the starving residents of Dharavi, this is home.” Swarup, Q & A, 133–34. 90. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 71. 91. Adiga, The White Tiger, 222. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 223. 94. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 73. 95. Adiga, The White Tiger, 223. 96. Ibid., 237. There is a parallel moment in Indra Sinha’s novel about the Bhopal chemical disaster, Animal’s People. Animal, Sinha’s legless and resolutely antihuman antagonist, extols the virtues of communal defecation in slums: “There’s a lot to be said for communal shitting. For a start the camaraderie. Jokes and insults. A chance to discuss things. . . . Then there’s the medical benefit. Your stools can be examined by all. . . . The rich are condemned to shit alone.” Sinha, Animal’s People, 184. Balram actively seeks the exclusive isolation that comes with being rich while Animal attempts to appropriate the conditions of inhumanity that his poverty and disability confer on him as a critique of global humanitarianism. 97. Adiga, The White Tiger, 241. 98. Ibid., 147. 99. Ibid., 149. 100. Nandy, Secret Politics of Our Desires, 4–5. 101. Slumdog Millionaire. 102. Anjaria and Anjaria, “Slumdog Millionaire and Epistemologies of the City,” 41. 103. Bauman, Liquid Fear, 2. 104. Ibid., 3. 105. de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, 11. 106. Ibid., 34. 107. Ibid., 37. 108. Tyree, “Against the Clock,” 35. 109. Indian management guru C. K. Prahalad makes an argument similar to de Soto’s in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. 110. Roy, “Slumdog Cities,” 229. 111. Adiga, The White Tiger, 60. 112. Ibid., 2. 113. In a positive review, Barkha Dutt celebrates the film’s depiction of “the energy, entrepreneurship and imagination of the slum” as “the jugadu

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spirit that is so typical of India.” Explaining “jugadu” as the “word for a marvelous invention—a hybrid automotive that welds the body of a jeep with the engine of a water pump and looks like a tractor,” Dutt asserts that “today it has come to be our shorthand for spunkiness—a we-willget-the-job done attitude no matter how bad the odds are” (quoted in Roy, “Slumdog Cities”). Dutt, as Roy notes, equates “the slum’s entrepreneurialism” with a “more widespread entrepreneurial spirit” coextensive with India (ibid., 227). 114. British travel writer Simon Crerar writes that the guide who led his tour of Mumbai’s Dharavi objected to the use of “slumdog” because of its stereotypical connotation: “People were angry with the way they were represented” (Crerar, “Mumbai Slum Tours”). 115. Adiga, The White Tiger, 43. 116. Ibid., 6. 117. Balram’s cunning of manners reproduces postures of his petit bourgeois masters resonant with Bhabha’s description of colonial mimicry as “the mode of appropriation and of resistance” that involves being “disciplined” and “desiring.” Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” 172. 118. Adiga, The White Tiger, 128. 119. Ibid., 275. 120. Ibid., 150. 121. Harvey, “Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets.” 122. Adiga, The White Tiger, 116. 123. Slums display the reciprocal logic that Roberto Esposito says constitutes the excesses of communal obligation on the basis of immunity. Common obligations, for Esposito, are eclipsed by forms of sovereignty that promote immunity for individuals through privatization, ownership, etc. Esposito, Bios. 124. Adiga, The White Tiger, 128. 125. Ibid., 207. 126. The term “jouissance” marks the distinction that Barthes makes between “plaisir” or “enjoyment” and “jouissance.” Jouissance, for Barthes—but also for Lacan and Žižek, who link it explicitly to consumption and value—is expressive of a shattering of self (with its requisite pain) that limns sublime pleasure. Embodiment and value are expended in jouissance. Jouissance is excessive pleasure that exceeds the moderation of the pleasure principle that strives for fullness but slides into its other, lack. 127. Adiga, The White Tiger, 161.

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128. 129. 130. 131.

Taussig, The Magic of the State, 3. Ibid. Ibid. Adiga responds to a question about Balram’s entrepreneurial skills: “There are lots of self-made millionaires in India now, certainly, and lots of successful entrepreneurs. But remember that over a billion people live here, and for the majority of them, who are denied healthcare, education, or employment, getting to the top would take doing something like what Balram has done” (Adiga, The White Tiger, 287). 132. Ibid., 211. 133. Frazer defines the “sympathetic magic” of occult belief as “false science” based on a “spurious system of natural law” that “assumes that things act on each other at a distance through secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether.” Frazer, The Golden Bough, 15. 134. Adiga, The White Tiger, 258. 135. Ibid., 9, 175. 136. Ibid., 215. 137. Ibid., 217. 138. Ibid., 260. My emphasis. 139. Ibid., 261. 140. Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” 336. 141. Ibid. 142. Ibid. 143. Crerar, “Mumbai Slum Tours.” Also cited by Ananya Roy, “Slumdog Cities.” 144. Ibid. 145. Davis, Planet of Slums, 179–83. 146. Adiga, The White Tiger, 43. 147. See Spivak, “Righting Wrongs.” 4. THE DEAD THAT HAUNT ANIL’S GHOST

1.

The difficulty of accounting for the numbers of dead and wounded in Sri Lanka is noted by Stanley Tambiah, E. Valentine Daniel, Donald L. Horowitz, and others. Tambiah’s Sri Lanka and Daniel’s Charred Lullabies offer divergent accounts of the excess and incoherence of Sri Lanka’s political violence. Tambiah posits rational parameters of economic dislocation, ethnicity, religion, language, and politicking to explain the explosive nationalist riots of the 1980s; Daniel argues that the

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

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cataclysmic social violence of civil war is illogical and beyond rational explanation. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 274. Sarath’s statement invokes the cycles of violence on the island. Tambiah discusses “mass violence” in 1958, 1977, 1981, and 1983. Tambiah, Sri Lanka, 13–15. The insurrection of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna in the late-80s and 2009, when the Tamil Eelam was militarily suppressed, are others. In The Deadly Ethnic Riot, Donald Horowitz details the difficulty of accounting for those enmeshed in an ethnic conflict. “In gauging the magnitude of an episode of ethnic rioting, . . . the cold body count is likely to mislead” (10). This is because as he puts it, “All casualty figures are estimates, notoriously inaccurate ones at that,” which can hardly account for the large numbers of missing: the burned-to-death, the secretly buried, and the unceremoniously drowned (10). The Times reported Sri Lanka’s death toll in May of 2009 at 20,000, while Pallister and Chamberlain, reporting for The Guardian, put it at 6,500, with 14,000 wounded. Neither report could be confirmed. Pallister and Chamberlain, “Sri Lanka War Toll.” In “Righting Wrongs” Spivak tracks “human rights culture” as a project with cultural orientations to the west that binds class elites across the global north and south (527). Her solution is to “supplement Metropolitan Humanities pedagogy” that she argues self-interestedly reproduces the teaching of benevolent coercion along colonial models in order “to learn from below” to further the “imagined felicitous subject of universal human rights” (533, 563). Ondaatje makes a similar critique of Anil’s benevolence in order to highlight the rational violence of her methods in contrast to the irrational violences she struggles to bring to order. Vilashini Cooppan’s idea of “ghost-reading” is useful here in pointing to the literary text itself as the site for a “series of ghostly encounters” that reform ideas of national identity. Cooppan, Worlds Within, xviii, 100–101. Her method of reading within frames of psychoanalysis and deconstruction is useful for discovering metaphors of disruption and instability that are constitutive of the postcolonial nation’s difference from the West. However, my tack with Ondaatje’s novel is ultimately different; I’m interested in the ways in which the novel is haunted by a certain stereotype about the dangers (violence, death) of living in postcolonial spaces. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 52.

4. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

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Stanton unconvincingly argues that Anil’s Ghost compels need for international criminal justice systems (Cosmopolitan Fictions, chap. 3); others persuasively assert that it undoes the judicial expectations of colonial intrigue fictions (Siddiqi, Anxiety of the Empire, 197) to provoke ethical reflections on affect (Staels, “A Poetic Encounter with Otherness”). Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 55. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 31–32. Ibid., 41. McClennan and Slaughter point to literature’s formal capacity in bringing human rights concerns to bear on art. McClennan and Slaughter, “Introducing Human Rights,” 10–12. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 55. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 269. Ibid., 56. The full quote reflecting Anil’s anxiety about the case she makes as a human rights activist is: “And in any case, if they did identify him, if they did discover the details of his murder, what then? He was a victim among thousands. What would this change?” Ibid. 176. For a related argument about raced and gendered itinerant human bodies as death-prone and recyclable, see Chakravorty and Neti, “The Human Recycled.” Yumna Siddiqi notes, “The text itself is a body that must be deciphered.” Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire, 193. While Siddiqi’s stress is on the form of the novel itself, and mine on a particular thematic, we share the idea that the novel exceptionally intervenes in readers’ attempts to enter its protocols. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1:258, 261. For Foucault, a shift to biopower explicitly signifies the “threshold of modernity” that makes human life subject to the proliferation of capital (ibid., 1:141). Agamben theorizes the state of exception by maintaining a similar assumption about the link between capital and biopower. As I argue later in the chapter, the perception of death as singular event or collective experience hinges on its critique of a liberal global project of human rights. For Agamben, the violence of the Holocaust is exemplary of the state of exception in which the camp exists as bare life. See Agamben, State of Exception; and Agamben, Homo Sacer.

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23. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 39; and Mbembe, “Life Sovereignty, and Terror,” 1. 24. Mbembe, “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror,” 1. For a more elaborate discussion of modern necropolitics, or what Mbembe sees as the “subjugation of life to the power of death” in his analysis of contemporary deathworlds, see Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 38–40. 25. The realm of politics, Mbembe argues, marshals the norms of “reason,” “freedom,” and “equality” to forward one narrative about modern sovereignty as progress. This norm is counterposed to the aberrant plays of “fantasy” or “passion” aligned with war. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 11, 13. Such accounts of the rule of reason occlude the murkier story of modernity’s exceptional engagements with other foundational categories such as life and death. 26. Ibid., 13, 14. 27. Agamben, State of Exception, 23. For Agamben, the “state of exception” does not mean existing within or outside the law but rather at its “threshold,” overlooking legal distinctions between fact and law (ibid., chap. 1). 28. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 175. “The camp,” Agamben asserts, “is merely the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth was realized: this is what counts in the last analysis, for the victims as for those who come after” (166). 29. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 34, 19, 25, 26. 30. See especially Mbembe’s On the Postcolony. 31. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 40, 34. For more on commandement, see Mbembe, On the Postcolony, chap. 1 and 2. 32. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 283. 33. Ibid., 11. 34. Ibid., 17–18. 35. Ibid., 209, 212–13. 36. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 34. 37. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 154. 38. Ibid., 255. 39. There are many other intricate theaters of death in Anil’s Ghost. The novel describes the emergency care that Gamini provides to the wounded—performing an intricate open heart surgery on a boy as if it were “magic” in the midst of a “massacre” that “wiped out” an entire village (240–41). Linus Corea, a kidnapped doctor, provides harrowing care to injured rebels (123–25). Sirissa encounters “heads of . . . students

4.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

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on stakes” moments before her disappearance, when she “feels” most “alive, wounded and raw but alive” (175). There are other “complete crimes,” such as the destruction of ancient Boddhisatva statues, a roadside attack on a truck driver, and numerous assassinations. Scanlan, “Anil’s Ghost and Terrorism’s Time,” 302. Ibid., 302–3. Abdul R. JanMohammed and Orlando Patterson discuss the deficit and excess of subjectivity that the threat of death confers in the context of slavery. See JanMohammed, The Death-Bound-Subject; and Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. Spivak’s term “subaltern subject-effect” points to the conundrum of historians seeking to “recover” subaltern consciousness, will, and presence from a colonial archive premised on the eradication of subaltern subjects. Her critique is that such recovery projects rehearse “the retrieval of subaltern consciousness” as an “effect of an operating subject” because historians are mediators whose projects “can never be proper to ‘subaltern consciousness.’” Spivak, “Subaltern Studies,” 204–5. Spivak’s idea that the subaltern’s textual presence is an effect, rather than a fact, is crucial because, as is the case with Ondaatje, it illuminates the historian’s or writer’s “political interest” in making claims on behalf of, and not as, subalterns (208). Ondaatje, Running in the Family, 22. Ondaatje’s Running in the Family reconstructs family history from moth-eaten ledgers, dusty photos, and hazily recollected stories to reveal the debauchery and disinheritance of the Ondaatje clan. The idyll of colonial frolic is transformed after decolonization to fading family ties and the rise of a new violence. By recording the insurgency that follows decolonization, pitting Sinhala against Tamil, Running invokes a pathos similar to Anil’s Ghost. The place of Ondaatje’s childhood is transformed entirely into a place where family ties disappear and violence governs everyday life. Running creates a subaltern effect for decolonial Sri Lanka. Ondaatje, Running in the Family, 69. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 104. Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur,” 270–71. Sunder Rajan, “Death and the Subaltern,” 117. Sunder Rajan finds subaltern death hard to locate in archives, a double elision: “The vanishing of their death is, of course, also their death” (134). Ibid., 131.

26 6 4.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

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Ibid. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 310. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 278. Appiah, In My Father’s House, 155. Appiah links pessimism in postcolonial African novels to a “transnational rather than a national solidarity” publicizing the “suffering of victims” (155). Jaggi, “Interview with Michael Ondaatje,” 253. Mbembe, “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror,” 1. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 43. Ibid., 283. Ibid., 7. My discussion of postcolonial crypt is indebted to the work of Nicolas Abram and Maria Torok. See The Shell and the Kernel; and The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 157. Ibid., 294–95. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 16. Abraham, and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 130. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 132. The crypt remains occluded from analysis or recognition because of linguistic subversions. The expressivity of language that makes narratives cohere mirrors the process of “decrypting” that allows hidden loss to emerge. Anil’s Ghost represents a crypt fraught with obscurity and revelation. Abraham and Torok call linguistic avoidances or “secrets,” “anti-metaphor,” “anti-semantics,” “designification,” and “demetaphorization.” Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 135. For Freud, “The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing investment energies to itself from all sides.” Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 212. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 132, 136–37. This symptom of aggression parallels Freud’s description of the death-drive as integral to civilizational evolution. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 82. A psychoanalytic reading of stereotypes of death that cast certain postcolonies in civilizational difference from the West while articulating a new affective politics of relational mourning is already scripted into Freud’s text, which renders all death as a contest in development between civilizations.

4.

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71. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 172. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 176. The idea of a transgenerational phantom goes beyond Freud’s formulation of repression where what is repressed in the individual psyche returns symptomatically as a response to social prohibitions (Freud, “Repression”). 74. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 176, 171. 75. Ibid., 175. 76. Ganeshananthan, “The Politics of Grief.” 77. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 103–4. 78. Ibid., 81, 83. 79. Ibid., 102. 80. Ibid., 105, 83, 82. 81. Ibid., 105. 82. Ibid., 176, 275. 83. Ibid., 107. 84. Ibid. Burrows interprets “Lakma’s aphasia” as a form of empathy key to the novel’s depictions of trauma. Burrows, “Heterotopic Spaces,” 174. She argues that Anil’s Ghost vacillates in its portrayal of acts that “witness” violence, and gestures of “whispering,” “listening,” and “touching” to elicit a compassionate response to “postcolonial trauma” (163). 85. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 2. 86. Ibid., 3. 87. Ibid., 4. 88. Caruth explicitly makes trauma a narrative event, arguing that “the parable of the wound” in Freud’s theory of trauma is about “the stories it unwittingly tells.” Trauma and narrative are intimately tied, making literary representation key to how collective wounds are socially experienced (4). Narrative, Caruth shows, is intrinsic to trauma because traumatic injuries are often hidden, and revealed later through metaphor. 89. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 107. 90. Ibid. 91. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 66. 92. Ibid., 118. 93. Despite Ondaatje’s efforts to steer away from representing Sri Lanka’s conflict along ethnic lines, this sign above the hospital doesn’t appear in Tamil. This is one of the few moments in the novel when Tamil exclusion from places of resource is expressly signaled. Gillian Roberts notes that this sign indicates “Tamils are not included in . . . medical hospitality.”

26 8 4.

94.

95.

96. 97. 98.

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Roberts, “Ethics and Healing,” 970. The coercion of Linus Corea in rebel camps is another instance. Critiquing the absence of history in Anil’s Ghost is commonplace. LeClair writes of its “irresponsible” apoliticism (“The Sri Lankan Patients”) while Ganapathy-Dore excoriates the novel’s turn to a “permanent cure” in art. Derrickson (“Will the ‘Un-truth Set You Free?,” 131), Goldman (“Representations of Buddhism,” 28), Kanaganayakam (“Anxiety of Being Postcolonial,” fn53), Ismail, and Abeysekara find it inadequately attuned to Sri Lanka’s ethnic identifications. Ismail, in Abiding by Sri Lanka, and in an article for Pravada (“A Flippant Gesture Towards Sri Lanka”) argues that Anil’s Ghost produces a “flippant gesture” toward social histories motivating the struggle. Abeysekara similarly argues that Ondaatje’s secularism masquerades as Buddhism (Abeysekara, Politics of Postsecular Religion). While these criticisms may be valid, I am interested here not in the lack of historicity itself in the novel but in the role that absence plays in making and unmaking stereotypes about Sri Lanka. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 45. Jan Patočka, along with Václav Havel, is known for being a founding member of the Charter 77 movement in communist Czechoslovakia. Charter 77, a manifesto that was banned from the late 1970s through the early 90s and whose signatories were persecuted, demanded that the nation’s constitution implement human rights provisions. Patočka studied with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and was influenced by their phenomenological philosophies. In The Gift of Death, Derrida reads Patočka’s influential Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 42. Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s Dasseinganzheit (The totality of being) that dwells on questions of life and death emphasizes this point. Derrida confirms that, for Heidegger, the irreplaceable aspect of dying ascertains that death cannot be exchanged; thus, it cannot be part of the generosity one might accord another. Derrida concludes: “I know on absolute grounds and in an absolutely certain manner that I will never deliver the other from his death, from the death that affects his whole being” (The Gift of Death, 43). This literal prohibition on dying in the place of another prompts his statements that for Heidegger a death can be temporally differed but not permanently deferred: “I can die for the other in a situation where my death gives him a little longer to live. . . .

4.

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But I cannot die in her place, I cannot give her my life in exchange for her death” (43). The fact that immortality is nontransferable remains the basis of a “freedom” and “responsibility” that is nonrelational (44). 99. Ibid., 82. Because of the absolute difference between self and other, “the concept of responsibility,” Derrida insists, is “found to lack coherence or consequence . . . paralyzed by what can be called an aporia or antimony” (84). Derrida believes that such a paralytic view of our responsibility toward another is what keeps it a highly functional concept, operational largely because “its absence of foundation” remains “obscured” and unexamined (84). 100. Ibid., 85. 101. Ibid., 44. 102. See Bataille’s conception of death as an excess of life beyond sovereignty in Visions of Excess; Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality and Beyond Good and Evil for his alignment of the “will to life” with the “will to power”; and Lévinas’s God, Death, and Time. 103. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 46. These are Derrida’s translations cited in The Gift of Death of Lévinas’s La mort et le temps, 38. 104. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 46. Judith Butler considers the ethical stakes that arise from becoming involved in or refusing to participate in the deaths of others. Butler poignantly asserts: “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.” Butler, Precarious Life, 23. The point is, in mourning others, especially those violently lost to us, we confront the ways in which we as subjects are constituted by our ties to one another. Yet the possibility that in some instances violence does not cause us to become “undone” marks a distance in how we apprehend certain traumatic acts or injurious events. I am interested in this dissonance between a kind of grief that “undoes” us and another kind that can be kept distant, especially when we encounter it in the form of a fiction about postcolonial worlds. Butler argues for the need to think beyond grief as a solitary, private experience, and to include in our mourning those whose deaths remain publicly unacknowledged. See Butler, Precarious Life; and Butler, Frames of War. 105. Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire, 199. 106. Makau Mutua argues that the “the normative edifice of the human rights corpus” is aligned with Western interests cast in the mode of savior. Matua, “Savages, Victims, Saviors,” 207. Mutua indicts predictable metaphors about cultural others—of savagery and victimhood—that condition the practice of human rights law.

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107. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 288. 108. For Derrida, being responsible for the death of another is to put one’s own life at stake. The other’s death becomes a point of mutuality or total self-sacrifice: “How does one give oneself death?” Derrida asks. “How does one give it to oneself in the sense that putting oneself to death means dying while assuming responsibility for one’s own death, committing suicide but also sacrificing oneself for another, dying for the other, thus perhaps giving one’s life by giving oneself death, accepting the gift of death.” Derrida, The Gift of Death, 10. 109. Ibid. 110. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is a counterexample. 111. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 54. 112. Other Anglophone fictions that invoke the threat of death in postcolonial nations are Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard; Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horsemen; Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother; J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Foe, Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning; Ben Okri’s The Famished Road; and Chris Abani’s Graceland. 113. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 55. Manav Ratti makes the argument that the “thematization of human rights within literary space” in Anil’s Ghost allows “the empire of signs” to become coextensive with “the empire of ethics.” He sees the novel enabling an “aesthetics” of human rights that is at odds with the law on human rights.” Ratti, “Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” 123, 122. 114. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 54. Prior to the moment when she testifies to a crime without proof, the novel endorses Anil’s alliance with the West. “I live here,” she affirms, “in the West” (36). Notably, Anil’s is the romantic life most explicitly shown in the book. She is also the only one who has the power to govern her sexual and nominal identity; she chooses who to be romantically involved with, and chooses to adopt her brother’s name as her own. 115. Ibid., 55–56. 116. Ibid., 56. 117. Ong, “Experiments with Freedom,” 237. 118. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 44. 119. Ibid., 55. 120. Ibid., 134–35. 121. Ibid., 135. 122. Ibid.

5.

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123. Ibid., 176. 124. Burrows, “Heterotopic Spaces,” 161. 125. Ibid., 167. 126. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 170. 127. Ibid., 184–85. 128. Ibid., 275. 129. Ibid., 272. 130. Jaggi, “Interview with Michael Ondaatje,” 251. 131. Daniel, Charred Lullabies, 3. Daniel writes, “Tellipalai, Nilaveli, Manipay, Boosa, Dollar Farm, Kakkdicholai  .  .  . have been transformed into names of places spattered with blood and mortal residue. Kelani Ganga and Kalu Ganga, Sri Lankan rivers of exquisite beauty, for a shuddering brief period in 1989, were clogged with bodies and foamed with blood. Many have died. How to give an account of these shocking events without giving in to a desire to shock?” (3). Here Daniel evinces a concern about the transformation of real places into ones overwhelmingly associated with violence in our common cultural imaginary; this is the problem of the stereotype—caught between the real, and its imaginative super-life—that I grapple with here. 132. Jaggi, “Interview with Michael Ondaatje,” 251. 5. FROM BANGLADESH TO BRICK LANE

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Ali, “The Outrage Economy.” Lea and Lewis, “Local Protests Over Brick Lane Film.” Ibid. Ali, “The Outrage Economy.” Ibid. Greer, “Reality Bites.” Ibid. Rushdie, Letter to the Editor. Ali, Brick Lane, 3. Marx,“The Feminization of Globalization,” 21. In contrast, Jane Hiddleston doubts that Brick Lane relies on realist conventions. She argues that the novel is against proffering unmediated objective truths about the community in Brick Lane and self-consciously points to itself as a parody. This seems plausible since Ali paints Hasina’s situation in Bangladesh in an impossibly broken English. Hiddleston, “Shapes and Shadows.” 11. Cormack, “Migration and the Politics of Narrative Form,” 697.

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12. See Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak,” a path-breaking essay that highlights the ideological and cultural matrixes that halt subaltern speech. 13. Perfect, “The Multicultural Bildungsroman,” 110. 14. See Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Eric Hobsbawm’s “Inventing Traditions.” 15. Culture is intimate to the means of control the state exerts over its citizen’s material lives. Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “nationalpopular” is a precursor to how culture has been imagined more recently. For Gramsci, the national-popular identifies Italy’s failure to generate a popular literature that is able to reach the most uneducated classes. The result is a corresponding failure to create cultural hegemony. Latent in Gramsci’s analysis is the notion that modern humanism is less about what individuals read than it is about how they live. For Gramsci, hegemony is secured through the extension of culture across the register of the popular, yet the popular is constituted on the level of the biopolitical. Conditions of class, race, sexuality, and gender inform not only politics of consumption but also ways of life. Gramsci’s work implies that the influence of the nation over patterns of culture exerts a profound effect on the politics of life. The centrality of control over the life of political subjects is taken up by theorists of the biopolitical with little attention to the specificities of culture. It is at the intersection of the cultural and the biopolitical that my notion of the biocultural takes shape. Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings. 16. Foucault originates the notion of biopolitics within his treatise on sexuality. The term “biocultural” borrows from Foucault, but I wish to stress the embodied ways in which power is exercised culturally as well as biologically. In addition to the disciplinary force of biopolitics, I intend to invoke the more consensual hegemonies that exert force through the mode of culture. 17. Ali, Brick Lane, 415. 18. Such a move is common for how “hybridity” works in the colonial and postcolonial scene as “cultural enunciation” or the “split-space enunciation” that, according to Bhabha, does not privilege “the exoticism of multiculturalism” as much as the “in-between” space in which cultural difference is inscribed through acts of active “translation and negotiation.” Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 56. Brick Lane leaves the outcome of such negotiations around migrant hybridity, itself a stereotype, up to the reader’s imagination.

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19. Greer, “Reality Bites.” 20. Jared Sexton, in Amalgamation Schemes, situates race similarly at the intersection of biology and culture: I work from a notion of race as neither a biological index of natural kind nor an illusion produced in culture. . . . Nor do I take race to be simply a social fact or “a complex of social meanings.” . . . Of course, race does exist, in some sense, as a reliable social indicator of life chances and as a traceable chain of significations, but its political ontology exceeds the terms of sociological investigation and the operations of the symbolic order: it is, to try another phrasing, a “division of species” . . . effected and maintained by the technologies of violence and sexuality that underwrite the social formation, not a discriminatory manipulation of already existing bodily marks. (11)

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Sexton’s discussion of race and its encoding through heteronormative reproductivity provides good backdrop for my argument here. See Hopkins and Hall, “David Copeland”; and Corner, “London Nail Bombs” for media accounts of the London nail bombings and bomber. Ali, Brick Lane, 394. Ibid., 396. Ibid., 396–97. Ibid., 397–98. Baucom, Out of Place, 192. In his review, M. K. Chakrabarti takes umbrage at this point. Finding that Ali demurs on direct engagement with the dark side of political disenfranchisement, race rage, and muticulturalism that weighs on migrant lives, he declares: “This is where the cheat of the successful commercial ‘multicultural novel’ is laid bare: for all its multicultural packaging, Brick Lane is a strictly monocultural, ‘see-they-are-just-likeus’ affair.” Chakrabarti, “Marketplace Multiculturalism.” Quoted in Gilroy, “‘The Whisper Wakes,’” 248. Ibid., 250. Ibid., 251. Ibid. See Robert Young’s and Ann Stoler’s extensive work on the relationship between sex and race. For both, racial purity is maintained through the policing of sexual desire. To cite Young’s now famous axiom: “Theories of race were thus also covert theories of desire.” Young, Colonial Desire, 9. See also Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.

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33. For more about the riots in Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford in the summer of 2001 with attention to the racial bases of the unrest, including the criminalization (often biocultural) of Bangladeshi and Pakistani men of these areas, see Bagguley and Hussain, Riotous Citizens. The riots, which began by targeting of South Asian communities by white youth, fomented because of bleak economic conditions and rising local anti-immigrant sentiments. 34. Ali, Brick Lane, 57. 35. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 297. 36. Chatterjee, “Nationalist Resolution,” 239. 37. Ali, Brick Lane, 7. 38. “Immigrants ‘Should Try to Feel British.’” BBC News, December 9, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1699847.stm. For an analysis of Blunkett’s speech and the cultural politics of the debate surrounding marriage practices, see Ratna Kapur’s “The Other Side of Universality.” Kapur situates the debate at the intersection of culture and legality. 39. “Immigrants ‘To Take Citizen Classes.’” BBC News, October 26, 2001. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1620900.stm. See also “Blair Backs Blunkett on Race.” BBC News. December 9, 2001. http://news.bbc .co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1700370.stm. 40. “MP Calls for English Tests for Immigrants.” BBC News, July 13, 2001. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1436867.stm. 41. Ibid. 42. Krishnan Kumar discusses how the English language has come to stand in for cultural identity in ways that cover over racial claims. Tracing the development of English nationalism from the twelfth century, Kumar argues that English national culture is centralized around language as a strategy for exclusion first by way of ethnicity and later by way of race. Kumar, The Making of English National Identity. 43. Of course, marriage is not really personal at all. Because normative reproduction takes place within the strictures of marriage, it is open to control, biologically and spatially. 44. “Immigrants ‘Should Try to Feel British.’” 45. Gillian, “Knowing English.” 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ali, Brick Lane, 88.

5. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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Ibid., 88–89. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 89. Naila Kabeer’s study of Bangladeshi homeworkers, which provided the inspiration for Ali’s novel, draws equivalence between maternity and domestic responsibility. Kabeer claims that “the third reason, and the one most widely cited [reason by women for working at home], related to the demands of women’s domestic roles. Around twenty-nine women referred specifically to their child care responsibilities.” Kabeer, The Power to Choose, 234. In Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen frames women’s “agency” in terms of its value not only to women but also to children. That the discussion of children and the politics of reproduction is located in a chapter titled “Women’s Agency and Social Change” captures the extent to which biological normativity is experienced disproportionately by women. Ali, Brick Lane, 89. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 1. Discussing realism in Brick Lane, Alistair Cormack views Hasina’s letters as a potential limit to the project of cultural translation. Cormack, “Migration and the Politics of Narrative Form,” 715. Early in the novel we are told that “Nazneen could say two things in English: sorry and thank you.” Ali, Brick Lane, 7. Cormack writes, “Without any account by the narrator, it is hard to know exactly what we are reading—whether the letters represent inept attempts at English or are a free translation from illiterate Bengali.” Cormack, “Migration and the Politics of Narrative Form,” 715. Canepari-Labib, “The Multiethnic City.” Hiddleston, “Shapes and Shadows,” 63. Ali, Brick Lane, 318. Perfect, “The Multicultural Bildungsroman,” 112. Ali, Brick Lane, 219, 276. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 6, 7. Ibid. Arjun Appadurai writes of the importance of fantasy in the era of transnationalism:

276 5.

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Until recently, whatever the force of social change, a case could be made that social life was largely inertial, that traditions provided a relatively finite set of possible lives, and that fantasy and imagination were residual practices, confined to special persons or domains, restricted to special moments or places. In general, imagination and fantasy were antidotes to the finitude of social experience. In the past two decades, as the deterritorialization of persons, images, and ideas has taken on new force, this weight has imperceptibly shifted. More persons throughout the world see their lives through the prisms of the possible lives offered by mass media in all their forms. (Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 53–54)

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Although Brick Lane is almost wholly devoid of media representation, Nazneen’s capacity to live in the realm of fantasy is, I think, very much a product of the new “global ethnoscapes” to which Appadurai refers. Marx, “The Feminization of Globalization,” 20. Ali, Brick Lane, 168. Ibid., 166–67. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 382. Ibid., 301, 382. Ali, Brick Lane, 397. Ibid., 402. Ibid., 415. Ibid., 408–9. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 4. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 2. Perfect, “The Multicultural Bildungsroman,” 110. 6. GOOD AND BAD TRANSNATIONALISMS?

1. 2.

3.

See Beary, “Six Jailed for Life.” Adiga, “Is Outsourcing the Next Terror Target?” The BBC reported that “Dharam Singh, then chief minister of Karnataka state, described the attack at the time as a plan to create terror in India’s technology hub, home to more than 1,500 software companies.” Beary, “Six Jailed for Life.” Adiga clarifies that the incident led to India’s effort to secure technological development from terrorism: “In a press statement released immediately

6.

4.

5.

6.

7.

G O O D A N D B A D T R A N S N AT I O N A L I S M S ?  2 7 7

after the terror attack, NASSCOM, the trade body for India’s technology sector, stated that the country’s outsourcing companies already have many security measures in place; however, it said that the incident highlights the need to review and upgrade these.” Adiga, “Is Outsourcing the Next Terror Target?” In 2005 the Center for Security Policy in Geneva defined “economic terrorism” as activities coordinated by “transnational or non-state actors” for “disrupting” the “financial stability of states, a group of states or a society such as market oriented western societies for ideological or religious motives.” This is the case for unfair child labor practices, sweatshop work, illdefined work days, hazardous work environments, and the absence of collective bargaining rights or basic health rights, all of which are objections raised against the practices of outsourced production. These concerns inflect the “fear” associated with the transnationalization of technology and service industry work. Arjun Appadurai argues that 9/11 has produced a “geography of anger” whose fractal effects are “replicas of larger struggles” over cellular nonstatist violence and the vertebrate violence of states. Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 100. Linking affect to social and political exigencies, Appadurai writes that terror evokes both the “power” and “fear of small numbers” in the “era of globalization” (109). Thus, stereotypes of terror and labor circle indeterminately around how individuality and collective action are affectively experienced as liberal global projects. Speaking to Indian business leaders, Obama said, “There still exists a caricature of India as a land of call centers and back offices that cost American jobs. That’s a real perception. But these old stereotypes, these old concerns ignore today’s reality: In 2010, trade between our countries is not just a one-way street of American jobs and companies moving to India. It is a dynamic, two-way relationship that is creating jobs, growth, and higher living standards in both our countries.” Stolberg and Bajaj, “In India, Obama Courts Corporate America.” This statement signaled a move past old grudges that both sides held against outsourcing. See also “Obama’s Outsourcing Stand Relieves Indian IT Industry,” Hindu, November 10, 2010, http://www.thaindian.com /newsportal/business/obamas-outsourcing-stand-relieves-indianit-industry-lead_100457675.html; and “Obama Strikes Out at Outsourcing Stereotypes,” Deccan Herald, November 8, 2010, http://www .deccanherald.com/content/111015/F.

278 6.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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Clinton,“Development in the 21st Century.” Nafees Asiya Syed and Laura Freschi argue that the relationship between development (through outsourcing projects) and defense is a blur. The political rhetoric of development obscures the “militarization” of altruism or aid given to the global south. As Freschi notes, the three Ds are not equal, and development is politically guided by priorities of national defense. See Syed, “3Ds of Foreign Affairs.” Aziz, “In Pakistan, Fight Terror by Creating Jobs.” See Veena Das’s Life and Words and Kavita Daiyas’s Violent Belongings for more about the quotidian violence of Partition. See Devarajan and Nabi, “Economic Growth in South Asia”; and Ding and Masha, “India’s Growth Spillovers.” Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 27. Ibid. This link between textual stereotyping and mimesis echoes Edward Said’s claim that “texts have ways of existing that . . . are . . . enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society—in short, they are in the world and hence are worldly.” Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 35. Leerom Medovoi’s “‘Terminal Crisis?’” and Elizabeth S. Anker’s “Allegories of Falling” offer differing interpretations of Hamid’s novel in the context of the genre of 9/11 literature. Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 70. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 73. Ibid. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 86, 89. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 89. Ibid. Ibid., 87–88. Jameson, “The Dialectics of Disaster,” 298. For Jameson, the naming of terror or patriotism depends on our ability to stereotype our affects: “But once a nameless and spontaneous reaction has been named and classified, and named over and over again so insistently by all actors of the public sphere  .  .  . the name interposes a stereotype between ourselves and our thoughts and feelings” (ibid., 299). The stereotype then assumes an inauthenticity derived of its over-

6.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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determined capacity to nominalize feelings. Its occurrence in literary texts involves such overdeterminations. Ibid., 298. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 7. Ibid., 17. Ibid. Žižek, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real!,” 132. Ibid., 133. Žižek’s point is that the spectral dimension of terror exposes the repressed, uncanny desires of American consumers because 9/11 visualized the most unspeakable of fantasies. Žižek links spectacle to terror, suggesting that its symbolics are materially the result of how globalization operates: “If there is a symbolism in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, it is . . . the notion that the towers stood for the center of virtual capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production” (132–33). Lentricchia and McAuliffe, “Groundzeroland,” 102. Ibid. Lentricchia’s and McAuliffe’s analysis of terror as pure spectacle invokes a novelistic frame of comparison: “In more traditional terms,” they write of 9/11, “there were authors; there was a plot—a structure of events with deep narrative inevitability; there were thousands of characters—but with no choice in turning down the role [death] . . . and there was an audience with no choice not to experience terrorist narrative” (ibid., 103). In short, terror as spectacle depends on a supernarrative. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, 30. Like Žižek, Baudrillard ties the spectacle of terror, its seeming “visible fracture” from liberal social forms, to rifts of globalization, arguing that its symbolic impact “pits the exploited and the underdeveloped globally against the Western world” (10). Terror’s visibility is thus the appearance of “triumphant globalization battling itself ” (11). Spivak, “Terror: A Speech After 9/11,” 92. Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 73–74. Ibid., 79. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 166, 175. Ibid., 177–78. Ibid., 233. Hobbes, in Leviathan, writes of fear and terror as penultimately defined through civil war, while Benjamin, in “Critique of Violence” (Reflections), addresses the state’s capacity to appropriate violence exclusively for itself as a mode of terror.

28 0 6.

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44. Ibid., 208, 156, 176 45. Spivak, “Terror: A Speech After 9/11,” 92. 46. Spivak observes that terror as an affect is strangely full and empty; this is why it eradicates distinctions between subject and object, self and other, while holding the terrorist in a place of radical difference outside common structures of human feeling: “Where terror is an affect, the line between agent and object wavers. . . . The terrorist is taken to be numbed to terror, does not feel the terror of terror, and has become unlike the rest of us by virtue of this transformation” (ibid., 92). Ambivalent stereotypes of terror take measure of this absolute difference that places terrorists outside affective circles while enjoining them with the ability to engender affective response. 47. Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 105. 48. Ibid., 105–6. 49. Sara Ahmed argues that stereotypes of terror assume social fixity. The “recognition of ‘could be terrorists,’” she notes, “depends upon stereotypes that are already in place, at the same time as it generates a distinct category of ‘the fearsome’ in the present.” Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 75. Malleable literary stereotypes exploit stereotypes in circulation that adhere to known structures of feeling. 50. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 86. 51. Ibid., 87. 52. Ibid. 53. Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 30. 54. Ibid. Many scholars have shown that affects are contingent. Sara Ahmed argues that unhappiness is a crucial counterpoint to happiness (The Promise of Happiness); Lauren Berlant reflects on the cruelty of optimism (Cruel Optimism); and Jonathan Flatley argues for modernist melancholia as a generative aesthetics (Affective Mapping). 55. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 2:118. 56. Sara Ahmed notes that shame is an “ambivalent” emotion that hinges on intersubjective perceptions: “Shame as an emotion requires a witness. Even if a subject feels shame when he is alone, it is the imagined view of the other that is taken on by a subject in relation to itself.” Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion 105. For Ahmed, the dialectical movement of shame between interior and exterior, self and collective is what makes it prominent in how “individual guilt” and “national shame” are conceived in tandem during historical crises. Shame, hence, like terror, embroils self and other in an affective embrace.

6. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

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Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 19. Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 1. Bhagat, One Night at the Call Center, “Preface.” Ibid. Ibid. Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 184. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 2, 8. Medovoi, “Terminal Crisis?,” 645. Ibid. Devji, Landscapes of Jihad, 9. Ibid., 135. Nadeem, Dead Ringers, 2. Ibid., 9. Bhagat, One Night at the Call Center, 208. Ibid., 223–24. Ibid., 224. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Alien-Nation,” 786. Ibid., 783. Ibid., 787. Ibid., 789. Ibid., 782. Ibid., 786. Ibid., 782. Nadeem, Dead Ringers, 10. As Nadeem’s sociological study of call center culture shows, Indians increasingly perceive India as the “electronic housekeeper to the world.” The negative effects of transnationalized labor is being newly articulated by workers who complain of long hours, erratic shifts, upset biological clocks, and substance dependencies that come from living out of their own time zones. 85. Monbiot, “The Flight to India.” Writing for The Guardian, Nadeem focuses on accent training in call centers to mark the cultural impersonations in vogue. As he notes, the pressure on workers to pass by imitating American and British accents is being replaced by “neutral” accent training that represents a global, regionless English. Accent impersonation, veering toward mock linguistic identities, hinges on the erasure of

28 2 6.

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locally inflected vernacular English. He writes of the identity crises that result in call centres management technologies [that] penetrate to the very core of your identity. As I witnessed during training sessions, employees are told that the customer can see their smile and sense their mood through their voice. Workers must be able to “pass” as American or British and maintain their composure in the face of sometimes racist abuse by irate customers; it is simply part of the job. (Nadeem, “Accent Neutralisation”) 86. Bhagat, One Night at the Call Center, 56. 87. In Mimesis, Auerbach famously distinguishes between two forms of mimetic realism, the “Homeric” mode that foregrounds sensory description and seeks a unity of representation and the “Biblical” one in which reality is conditioned on psychological perspective, uncertainty, and interpretation. Auerbach writes: We have compared these two tests and, with them, the two kinds of style they embody, in order to reach a starting point for an investigation into the literary representation of reality in European culture. In their opposition the two styles represent basic types: one showing fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, placing of all events in the foreground, unmistakable means, and few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective; and the other exhibiting certain parts brought into high relief and others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed “background” quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of “historical becoming,” and preoccupation with the problematic. (19–20) For Auerbach, the classical mythic type of the former, and the vernacular form of the latter comprise the two strands of realism prevalent in modernity: the social realism of nineteenth century novels and Christian derived modernist works. Stereotypes as mimetic devices inherit and straddle both these strands in the way that they scuttle between the real and the phantasmic. 88. Fuchs, Empire and Mimesis, 5. 89. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 21.

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90. 91. 92. 93.

Ibid., 237. Ibid., 81. Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” 333. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 281. Franco Moretti also provocatively argues for “distant reading” as a way to approach literary studies on a world systems scale, radically dispensing with ideas of close reading and cultural or temporal specificity of texts to make use of technological innovations to scan-read formal elements. See Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature.” 94. Marx, Capital, 125. 95. Walkowitz, “Comparison Literature,” 568. 96. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 17. 97. Ibid., 171. 98. Stereotypes represent a site of cultural “contradiction” in transnational texts that “obtains a “political” force” when as a “cultural formation” it “comes into contradiction with economic or political logics that try to refunction it for exploitation or domination.” Lowe and Lloyd, Politics of Culture, 1. The stereotypic transnational novel is a cultural artifact that obtains political charge depending on how it is intercepted by readers. 99. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 171. 100. Ali, Brick Lane, 304. 101. Ibid., 305. 102. Forster, A Passage to India, 22, 26. 103. See, for example, the works of Anita Desai, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Mulk Raj Anand, and R. K. Narayan. EPILOGUE: THE AFTERLIFE OF STEREOTYPES

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 281. Ibid. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 57. Ibid. Ibid., 56. Spivak, An Aesthetic Education, 458. Ibid. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 56. Cooppan, “The Ethics of World Literature,” 36. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 38.

28 4  E P I LO G U E :

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

T H E A F T E R L I F E O F S T E ROT Y P E S

Ibid. Ibid. Iser, The Act of Reading, 168. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 167. Walkowitz, “Comparison Literature,” 569, 568. Baucom, “Globalit, Inc.,” 162. Walkowitz, “Comparison Literature,” 570. Ibid. Ibid., 568. Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 175. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 174. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 24, 26; see also ibid., chap. 2. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 31. Spivak, “Harlem,” 117–18. Clifford, “Introduction,” 4. Ibid., 6. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 146.

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INDEX

Abeysekara, Ananda, 268n94 abjection, and slum life, 100–108 Abraham, Nicolas, 136–37, 266n68 Achebe, Chinua, 37, 242n122 Adiga, Aravind, 2; controversy over The White Tiger, 91; on entrepreneurship in India, 261n131; and literacy and dissent, 116; on outsourcing and terror, 187, 276–77nn 2,3. See also The White Tiger Adorno, Theodor, 215 affect, 13; affects as contingent, 280n54; and call center labor, 210–12; emotional charge of stereotypes, 20; fear, abjection, and affective life of slums, 100–108; and invisibility of labor, 210; melancholia, 48, 135–41, 144, 266n69, 280n54; mourning, 136–41, 269n104; shame, 199–202, 211–12, 280n56; stereotypes and affective ties to community, language, culture, and national identity, 19, 20, 206; and terror, 194–202, 279n27, 280n46 Agamben, Giorgio, 125–26, 156, 263nn 21,22, 264nn 27,28 agency, 51, 64–65, 75, 155, 180–81, 225, 275n54 Ahmad, Aijaz, 77, 239–40n75 Ahmad, Omair, 120 Ahmed, Sara, 280nn 49,54,56 Ali, Monica, 48, 151–56. See also Brick Lane Ali, Rubina, 254n34

allegory, 22, 89, 214–15; and Midnight’s Children, 51, 52, 82; and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 197–201; and The White Tiger, 89 Allport, Gordon, 17 alterity, 33, 57, 104, 210–11, 220, 221 Althusser, Louis, 248n65, 251n124 Amalgamation Schemes (Sexton), 273n20 Amin, Shahid, 248–49n69, 249–50n83 Amossy, Ruth, 241n87 Anand, Mulk Raj, 42 Anderson, Benedict, 14, 19, 185 Anil’s Ghost (Ondaatje), 47, 119–50; beginning of, 134; characters, 122–24, 138–39, 143–44, 147–48, 270n114; critiques of absence of history in, 268n94; cultures of massacre and theaters of death, 124–30, 141, 264–65n39; and “human problem,” 119–20, 124; and human rights discourse, 139–40, 143, 145–50, 261n4, 263n17, 270n113; and pietà, 143–44; and “play” of death, 128–29; plot, 122–24, 128–29, 134–35, 138–41, 143–45, 147–48, 270n114; and postcolonial crypt and cultural melancholia, 135–41, 150, 266n67; and responsibility toward the other, 141–44; and self-depravation, 45; Siddiqi on, 122, 124, 143; subaltern aesthetics and global maps of injury, 130–35; and Tamil exclusion, 267n93; terror in, 128–29; and the unhistorical dead, 122–24

306INDEX Animal’s People (Sinha), 88, 259n96 anthropology, 215, 229; and figure of the native, 256n55; and magical realism, 56; and modernity, 114, 254n35; and slums, 92–93, 96, 113 Appadurai, Arjun, 95–96, 256n55, 275–76n70, 277n6 Appiah, Kwame, 133, 266n54 Apter, Emily, 33 Armstrong, Nancy, 34 Asad, Talal, 135 assimilation, 158–67, 179, 181; and British politics, 161–62; stereotypes about inassimilable immigrants, 21, 48, 161–62. See also Brick Lane An Atlas of Impossible Longing (Roy), 234n132 Attridge, Derek, 224 Auerbach, Erich, 214–15 Aziz, Maha Hosain, 188–89 Bachchan, Amitabh, 3, 253n28 Bal, Hartosh Singh, 4–5 Balibar, Etienne, 248n65 Bangladesh, 48, 172, 174–86, 189. See also Brick Lane “bare life” (Agamben’s concept), 125–26, 263n22 Barthes, Roland, 6, 22–25, 239n59, 260n126 Baucom, Ian, 160, 225 Baudrillard, Jean, 196, 279n37 Bauman, Zygmunt, 87–88, 107, 252n20 Baumgartner’s Bombay (Desai), 244n135 Beaufoy, Simon, 253n28 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 116, 198, 215–16, 279n43 Berlant, Lauren, 280n54 Bhabha, Homi, 272n16; on chain of stereotypes, 12, 31–32; and colonial stereotyping, 29, 30; and Jaipur Literature Festival, 8; on magical realism, 57; and mimicry, 192–93, 213; and national consciousness, 184–85; on stereotypes as ambivalent forms of cross-cultural suture, 13, 30–31; on stereotypes as phobia and fetish, 32; and stereotypes formed through the “scopic drive,” 33 Bhadhuri, Bhuvaneswari, 131 Bhagat, Chetan, 2, 49. See also One Night at the Call Center Bhattacharya, Bhabani, 44

The Big Necessity (George), 258n88 bildungsroman, 52 biocultural, the, 156–57, 272n15. See also immigrants biopolitics, biopower, 12, 13; and “bare life” (Agamben’s concept), 125–26; and death, 125–28; Foucault and, 125, 126, 263n21, 272n16; and gender, 164–67, 172–73; and immigrants, 154–57, 170, 172–74; and multitudes, 82–84 Blunkett, David, 167–68, 169 Booker, M. Keith, 81 Booker Prize, 52, 85, 257n61 Boot Polish (film), 88 Born into Brothels (film), 88, 252n10 Bourdieu, Pierre, 22–23, 227 Boyle, Danny, 85, 91, 253n26, 254n29. See also Slumdog Millionaire Braly, Kenneth, 17 Brathwaite, E. K., 242n122 Brennan, Timothy, 50–51, 62 Brick Lane (Ali), 48, 275n54; and agency, 155, 180–81; beginning of, 175–76; and biopolitics, 154–57; Chakrabarti on, 273n27; characters, 155, 157–59, 163–64, 171–74; and citizenship, naturalization, and assimilation, 158–67, 181; controversy over, 48, 151–56, 185; critiques of, 176–77; and cultural authority, 151–56; ending of, 158–59, 179–84; and English language skills, 166–67, 275n59; and family culture, 157–59; and fate, 174–75, 179, 182; and freedom, 179, 180–82; Greer’s criticism of, 152–54; Hiddleston on, 271n10; and hybridity, 272n16; and immigrants’ loss of identity, 171–72; letters as narrative device, 176–79, 275n60; and London nail bombings (1999), 159–60; Marx and Cormack on, 155; maternity and domesticity in, 163–67, 172–73, 275n54; and 9/11, 218–19; Perfect on, 155, 176–78, 185; plot, 155, 157–61, 163–64, 166–67, 171–85, 217–18; realism in, 155, 159, 271n10, 275n58; representation of Bangladesh, 172, 174–86; riot scene, 160–61, 181; Rushdie on, 152, 154; structure of novel, 180; and West as place of freedom without sociality, 179 Britain: Britishness and Brick Lane controversy, 152–55; citizenship and

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assimilation, 161–63; race riots, 167, 170, 274n33; racial tensions and stereotyping, 167–70. See also colonialism; English language Brook, Daniel, 256n49 Buddha of Suburbia (Kureishi), 45 Butler, Judith, 269n104 call center labor: call center genre, 49, 208, 212 (see also One Night at the Call Center; outsourcing); and impersonation and mimicry, 203, 212, 213, 281–82n85 Canepari-Labib, Michela, 176 capitalism: convergence of capitalism and print technology, 14; “dead capital” of slums, 107–8; and exploitation, 107, 117; and labor, 210–11; and multitudes, 65–67; and spectacle, 195. See also entrepreneurship/opportunism Carson, Anne, 146 Caruth, Cathy, 140, 267n88 Casanova, Pascale, 217, 227–28 A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Hanif), 120 caste, 5, 234–35n132 Chakra (film), 88 Chakrabarti, M. K., 273n27 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 190, 246n19 Chamberlain, Gethin, 261n3 chance, 86, 109, 114 Chandra, Nandini, 252n21 Chandra, Vikram, 88 “Chandra’s Death” (Guha), 132 Charred Lullabies (Daniel), 261n1, 271n131 Chatterjee, Partha, 72–73, 79, 164–66 Chaudhuri, Amit, 6 Chopra, Deepak, 3 Chow, Rey, 27–28, 30, 33–36, 238n38, 241nn 86,88, 242n119 Chua, Amy, 3 The Circle of Reason (Ghosh), 88 citizenship, 162–63, 167–68 clichés, 18, 24, 238n55 Clifford, James, 92–93, 229, 254n35, 255n37 Clinton, Hilary, 188 Coetzee, J. M., 2 colonialism, 27–33; and ambivalence of stereotypical articulations, 31, 32; and Chatterjee on distinction between “fuzzy” and “enumerable” communities, 72–73; cultural stereotypes and colonial power, 28–31; and English as

dominant literary language of South Asia, 37–38; and impersonation and mimicry, 30–31, 192–93, 215; and Jaipur Literature Festival, 4–5; Kipling and Gunga Din stereotype, 229–30; and links between sex and race, 242n105; and “stereotype-as-suture” (Bhabha’s ideas), 30–31; stereotypes about Indian weakness, depravity, and lack of agency, 42; stereotypes of natives, 32, 235n15; and stereotypical reproduction, 14–15 Comaroff, Jean, 211 Comaroff, John, 211 community: Anderson on the nation as imagined political community, 19; and Brick Lane controversy, 151–56 (see also Brick Lane); Chatterjee on distinction between “fuzzy” and “enumerable” communities, 72–73; culture as an imagined community, 156; and minor collectives in Midnight’s Children, 71–82; and slums, 47, 90, 112–13; stereotypes and affective ties to community, language, culture, and national identity, 19 comparison literature, 217, 226 Confessions of a Call Center Gal (Lim), 208 contact zone, 92 Cooppan, Vilashini, 223–24, 235n28, 261n5 Copeland, David, 160 Cormack, Alistair, 155, 176, 275nn 58,60 Cracking India (Sidhwa), 44, 120, 244n135 Crerar, Simon, 116–17, 260n114 criminality/cunning, 47, 86–90, 100. See also The White Tiger crowdedness, 1, 11, 12, 42, 230; and Brick Lane’s representation of Bangladesh, 175–76; and chain of stereotypes, 12; and Midnight’s Children, 46. See also fecundity; multitudes; overpopulation The Crown and the Loincloth (Nahal), 44 Crowther, Hal, 89 Cryer, Ann, 168–69 crypt, postcolonial, 135–41, 150, 266n67 culture, 13; attitudes to social difference dictated by visual power of stereotypes, 34; biocultural issues, 156–57, 159, 272n15, 273n20; cultural authenticity, 4–5, 14–15; cultural authority and Brick Lane controversy, 151–56; cultural

308INDEX culture (continued) codes, 23; cultural identity and stereotypes, 19–23; cultural melancholia, 135–41, 266n67; cultures of massacre and theaters of death, 124–30, 141, 264–65n39; and marriage, 274n38; mass culture and invention of stereotype printing, 14; the “nationalpopular” (Gramsci’s concept), 272n15; and representational effect of stereotypes, 29; role of stereotypes in cultural reproduction, 14; Said and, 28–29; transnational novels as cultural artifacts, 283n98 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 29, 240n79 Dalai Lama, 3 Dalit, 3, 244n132 Dalrymple, William, 2, 4–5, 8 Damrosch, David, 216, 222 Daniel, Valentine, 149, 261–62n1, 271n131 Davis, Mike, 47, 91, 108, 117 The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Horowitz), 262n3 death, 1, 11, 12, 47, 264n25; and “bare life” (Agamben’s concept), 125–26, 263n22; Butler on, 269n104; cultures of massacre and theaters of death, 124–30, 141, 264–65n39; deathworlds (Mbembe’s concept), 47, 125–27, 133, 135; Derrida on, 142–44, 268n98, 270n108; and ethics, 47–48, 121, 133; Freud and, 266n70; Heidegger and, 143, 268n98; and human rights discourse, 145–48; legal redress for political deaths, 122; Lévinas on, 143; list of novels depicting pervasive violence, 120; meaninglessness of individual life in the postcolony, 120, 126; “necropolitics” (Mbembe’s concept), 125–26, 264n25; one’s inability to die in place of another, 142, 268n98; pietà, 143–44; and political violence in Sri Lanka, 119–50 (see also Anil’s Ghost ); and postcolonial crypt and cultural melancholia, 135–41, 266n67; and responsibility, 121, 141–44, 269n99, 270n108; and sovereignty, 125, 126; and subaltern aesthetics and global maps of injury, 130–35; subaltern death, 131–33, 265n49; and subaltern melancholia, 48, 135–41; the unhistorical dead, 122–24

Debord, Guy, 195 decolonization, 51, 85, 256n58, 265n45. See also Midnight’s Children; postcolony; slums DeLillo, Don, 196 Derrida, Jacques, 48, 142–44, 200, 268n95, 269n99, 270n108 Desai, Anita, 244n135 Desai, Kiran, 45 desire: and fetish aspects of stereotypes, 33; and relationship between race and sex, 273n32; “slum magic” and desire, aspiration, and consumption, 89–90, 112–13, 252n20 de Soto, Hernando, 107–8, 256n49 Development as Freedom (Sen), 275n54 development narratives, 278n8; and freedom, 189; and “slum magic,” 89–90, 108–18; and terror, 188–89. See also globalization Devi, Jyotirmoyee, 244n135 Devi, Mahasweta, 3, 8, 131 Devji, Faisal, 44, 206–7, 210 Dewey, John, 19 Dhobi Ghat (film), 88, 252n10 Didot, Firmin, 236n6 Difference and Pathology (Gilman), 25 Dimock, Wai Chee, 226–27, 229 Dirks, Nicholas, 244n132 doctors, foreign, 170–71 domesticity, 163–67, 172–73 domestic labor, 2, 48, 180–81 Doshi, Tishani, 2 Douglas, Mary, 101 Dravid, Rahul, 3 Dutt, Barkha, 3, 259–60n113 Dyer, Richard, 20, 30 effeminacy, 43, 44, 69–70 Empire (Hardt and Negri), 64–67 English language, 242n122; and cultural politics of South Asia, 36–41; and English national culture, 274n42; and immigrants, 166–70, 275n59; and India’s nationalist movement, 38–41, 43; and South Asian doctors, 170 entrepreneurship/opportunism, 85–90; Adiga on, 261n131; and “dead capital” of slums, 107–8; and reality slum tours, 99, 117; in Slumdog Millionaire, 87, 89–90, 259–60n113; and “slum magic,”

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108–18; in The White Tiger, 87, 89, 108–9, 111–12, 261n131 Esposito, Roberto, 260n123 ethics of global literature, 2, 11–12, 221–31; and concerns about globalization, 93; and cultural and racial authenticity, 4–5; and death, 47–48, 133, 141–44; and interpretative engagement and textual worldliness, 29–30; and Jaipur Literature Festival, 4, 6–8; and marketing literary consumption, 7; and mimesis, 216; and multitudes, 82–83; and readers’/audiences’ complicity, 10, 36, 118, 144, 206; and reality slum tours, 99; and responsibility toward the other, 121, 141–44, 269n99; and slums, 92–93, 96, 117–18; and subalternity, 117, 121, 133, 141–44; utopian ethics and transnational literature, 226–27 ethnic stereotyping, 35–36. See also race ethnography, 92–93, 229, 252n10, 255n37 excrement, 102–3, 258n88, 259n96 The Falling Man (DeLillo), 196 family, 111–12, 157–59. See also domesticity Fanon, Frantz, 17, 37, 96, 184, 235n15, 256n58 fantasy: Appadurai on, 275–76n70; Brick Lane and, 276n70; magic and call center labor, 211, 213; stereotypes as part real and part phantasmic, 1, 10, 11, 93, 202, 213, 228, 231. See also magical realism Faris, Wendy, 56 fate, 174–75, 179, 182 fear: and Anil’s Ghost, 146; and call center labor, 211–12; fear, abjection, and affective life of slums, 100–108. See also terror fecundity, 46, 50, 65, 67, 77, 78, 157, 169, 230. See also crowdedness; multitudes; overpopulation femininity, stereotypes of, 163–67 fetishistic aspects of stereotypes, 27–33, 98, 114, 195, 217, 257n71 film: controversy over film version of Brick Lane, 151–56; Mitchell on effectiveness of stereotypes in racial film imagery, 32; and realism, 252n10; Schweinitz on stereotypes in film, 17; slum genre, 88, 252n10 (see also Slumdog Millionaire); and “voyeuristic-

scopophilic” gaze (Mulvey’s conception), 98, 257n71 filth. See squalor A Fine Balance (Mistry), 88 Flatley, Jonathan, 280n54 Forna, Aminatta, 2 Forster, E. M., 219 Foucault, Michel, 156, 239–40n75, 272n16; analytics of biopower, 125, 126, 263n21; Said and, 29; and voyeurism, 92 Foulis, Andrew, 13, 236nn 6,7 Fox, Liam, 170 France, French language, 228 Frankenberg, Ruth, 240n75 Frazer, James George, 114–15, 261n133 freedom: and Brick Lane, 179, 180–82; and development, 189; and Midnight’s Children, 50, 51, 61–62; and obsession with things, 61–62; and the postcolony, 189–90; repression of collective freedoms and multitudes as “singular plurality,” 60; and violence, 189; work as freedom vs. work as bondage, 211 free speech, 5, 6, 151–52 Freschi, Laura, 278n8 Freud, Sigmund, 100, 136, 139, 140, 258n81, 266nn 69,70, 267n73 Fuchs, Barbara, 215 Funny Boy (Selvadurai), 120 Ganapathy-Dore, Geetha, 268n94 Gandhi, Indira, 61, 70 Gandhi, Leela, 69, 243n130 Gandhi, Mohandas, 39–46, 69–70, 243n130, 248–49n69 Gandhi, Sanjay, 61, 70 Ganeshananthan, V. V., 138 Garvey, Marcus, 243n130 Ged, William, 13, 236n6 Genette, Gérard, 23–24 George, Rose, 258n88 Ghosh, Amitav, 7, 88, 120 Giddens, Anthony, 235n27 The Gift of Death (Derrida), 142 Gilman, Sander, 25–27, 30, 241n86 Gilroy, Paul, 161–62 Giridharadas, Anand, 87, 98–99 globalization, 96, 208; and allegory, 89; Baucom on, 225; and connection between fear and abjection, 100–101; and desire, aspiration, and consumption,

3 10  I N D E X globalization (continued) 89–91; and divide between order and disorder, security and danger, etc., 101; and divide between tourists and vagabonds, 87, 88 (see also tourism); and English language, 36–41; and exploitation, 107; failure of promise of, 97–98, 114 (see also postcolony: failure of; slums); game show as metaphor for, 86; and Hardt and Negri’s Empire, 64–67; and “India Shining” slogan, 94, 255n42; inequalities, slum life, and opportunism, 85–90 (see also slums); and positive and negative stereotypes, 21; and “slum magic” and development narratives, 108; and terror, 279n37; and violent entrepreneurship, 89; and voyeurism, 92, 97 (see also tourism); and zombies, 211. See also outsourcing; terror global literature. See ethics of global literature; literature, global/transnational/ world God, Death and Time (Lévinas), 143 The God of Small Things (Roy), 120, 234n132 Gokhale, Namita, 2 Goldman, Marlene, 268n94 Gramsci, Antonio, 272n15 The Great Indian Novel (Tharoor), 45 Greer, Germaine, 152–54 Grewal, Inderpal, 77 The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Rushdie), 76–77, 83 Guha, Ranajit, 132 Gunga Din, 221, 229–30 Hai, Ambreen, 77 Hall, Stuart, 225 Hamid, Mohsin, 2, 48, 120. See also The Reluctant Fundamentalist Hanif, Mohammed, 88, 120 Hardt, Michael, 46, 57–58, 64–67, 83, 246nn 24,28, 248n59 Heidegger, Martin, 143, 235n28, 268n98, 268nn 95,98 Herhan, Louise-Etienne, 236n6 Hiddleston, Jane, 176, 271n10 Hindi, 39 histories, major and minor, 56, 246n19 Hoffmann, François, 236n6 Homer, 23

homosexuality, 13, 71–77 Horowitz, Donald, 262n3 How We Think (Dewey), 19 humanism, 98, 116, 223, 239–40n75, 272n15 human rights discourse, 139–40, 143, 145–50, 261n4, 263n17, 269n106, 270n113 humor, 208, 212, 213 hunger, 11, 38, 42–45, 47 Husserl, Edmund, 268n95 identity: and Brick Lane, 151–56, 171–72; identity politics, 33–36, 151–56; immigrants’ loss of, 171–72; and Midnight’s Children, 51; and mimesis, 28, 35–36; and slums, 104; stereotypes and cultural identity, 19–23, 35–36, 151–56 Ilaiah, Kancha, 3 immigrants, 1–2, 11–12, 190; and agency, 180–81; anti-immigrant activism and terrorism, 159–60; assimilation, 21, 48, 158–67, 179, 181; and biopolitics, 172–74; and Brick Lane, 48, 151–86 (see also Brick Lane); and British politics, 161–62; and chain of stereotypes, 12; citizenship and naturalization, 158–67; and English language skills, 157, 166–70, 275n59; and family, 157–59; and fecundity, 157, 169; and hybridity, 155, 159, 272n16; and impersonation and mimicry, 191–94; and loss of identity, 171–72; and marriages, 168–69; and 9/11, 192 (see also The Reluctant Fundamentalist); nostalgia for place of origin, 174, 176; and patriarchy, 157; and race and cultural identity, 154–57; and racial tensions and stereotyping, 167–74; stereotypes described, 21, 48, 157, 161–62, 169; and traditionalism, 157, 169; trope of domestic space threatened by “cultural difference,” 169–70 India, 42, 249n69; anticolonial movement, militant, 70, 74, 249–50nn 79,83; anticolonial movement, nonviolent, 41–46, 164–65; caste, 5, 234–35n132; colonial stereotypes about Indian weakness, depravity, and lack of agency, 42; difficulties of representation, 6; as divided nation, 93–97, 255n42; earliest Indian Anglophone novels, 42; and English language, 38–41, 43; and globalization, 85, 94 (see also slums); image projected

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to international audience, 38–40; independence and decolonization, 2, 38–41, 50–85, 256n58, 265n45 (see also Midnight’s Children; postcolony; slums); “India Shining” slogan, 94, 255n42; Jaipur Literature Festival, 2–10, 233n3, 234nn 16,18, 235n19; Obama’s visit to (2010), 188; Partition, 53, 74, 244–45n135; passive resistance/ Gandhianism, 38, 41–46, 243n130; political violence in, 189; Rushdie’s critique of developmental narrative, 51, 61; shooting at Indian Institute of Science (2005), 187; stereotypes engendered by anticolonial movement, 41–46; stereotypes of Indian femininity, 164–67; vulnerable lower-middle class, 106. See also colonialism; outsourcing; South Asia Inheritance of Loss (Desai), 45 Iser, Wolfgang, 224–25 Islam, 168–69 Ismail, Qadri, 268n94 Italy, 272n15 Iyer, Pico, 2 Jaipur Literature Festival, 2–10, 233n3, 234nn 16,18, 235n19 Jameson, Fredric, 21–22, 26, 56, 194, 278n27 JanMohammed, Abdul, 265n42 Jay, Paul, 38 Jeffries, Stuart, 253n27 Jimmy the Terrorist (Ahmad), 120 Johnson, John, 236n6 Joseph, Manu, 234n16 Joshi, Priya, 242n122 Joshi, Ruchir, 5 jouissance, 112, 260n126 Kabeer, Naila, 275n54 Kabir, Nasreen, 233n3 Kanaganayakam, Chelva, 268n94 Kanthapura (Rao), 42 Kapur, Ratna, 274n38 Kapur, Sudarshan, 243n130 Kartography (Shamsie), 120 Katz, Daniel, 17 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 72 Khaled, Hosseini, 120 Kincaid, Jamaica, 2 Kipling, Rudyard, 89, 221, 229–30

The Kite Runner (Hosseini), 120 Korte, Barbara, 253n25 Kristeva, Julia, 100–102 Kumar, Amitava, 5 Kumar, Krishnan, 274n42 Kumar, Pramod, 5 Kumar, Surendra, 170 Kunzru, Hari, 2, 5 Kureishi, Hanif, 2, 45 labor, 184–95; domestic labor, 2, 48, 180–81; and exploitation, 67, 107, 117, 188, 210–12; and freedom, 180–82; and multitudes, 65–67; and terror, 188–89; work as freedom vs. work as bondage, 211. See also One Night at the Call Center; outsourcing language: Barthes on, 24–25, 239n59; clichés, 18, 24, 238n55; Gandhi and, 39–41; Genette on, 23–24; Gilman on, 25; and Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education,” 41; Riffaterre on, 24; stereotypes as integral to language use, 36–37, 238n55; and stereotypes in literature, 24–25; and worlding, 25. See also English language Lawrence, D. H., 119 Leahy, Joe, 255n37 LeClair, Tom, 268n94 Lentricchia, Frank, 195, 279n36 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 143 liberalism, 46, 80, 89, 134, 246n28, 251– 52n5. See also capitalism; development narratives; freedom; globalization Lim, Lisa, 208 Lippman, Walter, 19–21, 235nn 28,31,32, 238n41 literacy, 115–16 literature, global/transnational/world, 1–2, 11, 221–31; Casanova on world literature, 217–18, 227–28; comparison literature (Walkowitz’s concept), 217, 226; Cooppan on world literature, 223–24; and cultural codes, 23; Damrosch on world literature, 216, 222; earliest Indian Anglophone novels, 42; English as dominant literary language of South Asia, 36–38; ethics of (see ethics of global literature); functions of stereotypes in, 23–27; Jaipur Literature Festival, 2–10; and literary capital, 227;

3 12  I N D E X literature (continued) and literary merit, 227–28; and marketing literary consumption, 7; Moretti on world literature, 222–23; narrative theorists on use of stereotypes in, 23–27; novels as commodities/material objects, 216–17; novels as cultural artifacts, 283n98; novels depicting pervasive violence, 120; novels depicting slums, 88; novels and films depicting outsourcing, 208; portability of, 226; Spivak on world literature, 223 (see also Spivak, Gayatri); stereotypes as potentially productive aspect of, 17; and stereotype’s relation to mimesis, 214–20; and terror and outsourcing, 190–91 (see also outsourcing; terror); and textual worldliness (Said’s concept), 29–30; and utopian ethics, 226–27; Walkowitz on transnational literature, 217, 225–26; worlding of world literature, 222; world literature as “mode of reading” (Damrosch’s definition), 216, 222 Little Hans, 100, 258n81 Lloyd, David, 283n98 London nail bombings, 159 Lowe, Lisa, 283n98 Macaulay, Thomas, 41 magical realism: and anthropological perspective, 56; Bhabha on, 57; efficacy of, 56–57; Faris on, 56; and historical narratives, 55–56, 59; Jameson on, 56; and Midnight’s Children, 46, 51, 53–57, 59, 63; Mikics on, 55; and The Satanic Verses, 80; Slemon on, 56, 246n21; “slum magic,” 89–90, 108–18; and social realist novels, 219; Spindler on modes of, 246n20; and stereotypes, 57. See also fantasy Malinowski, Bronislaw, 254n35 Mani, Lata, 240n75 Manto, Saadat Hasan, 244n135 marriage, 168–69, 182, 274nn 38,43 Marx, John, 155, 180 Marx, Karl, 32, 66–67, 217, 248n65 Mayo, Katherine, 42 Mbembe, Achille, 47, 48, 90, 125–26, 133, 264n25 McAuliffe, Jody, 195, 279n36

McClennan, Sophia, 123 McClintok, Anne, 241n105 McEwan, Ian, 2, 196 Medintz, Scott, 89 Medovoi, Leerom, 206 megacities, 91, 253n23. See also slums melancholia, 48, 135–41, 144, 266n69, 280n54 Meschkank, Julia, 99, 257nn 72,73 metaphor, 19–21, 31–32, 86, 169, 171, 182 metonym, 33, 38, 91, 124 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 50–64, 68–84; and agency, 51, 75; and Booker Prize, 52; Brennan on, 50–51, 62; caricatures of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi, 61, 70; characteristics of narrator, 52–53; characters, 52–53, 59–62, 69–70, 74–76, 78, 81–82, 249n81; and collective nonviolence, 44; and contending visions of the postcolonial nation, 61–62; and crowds and overpopulation, 46; ending of, 63, 70–71; and failure of softer side of Indian nationalist dream, 69–71; and failure of the elite to represent the entire nation, 62; and freedom, 61–62, 189; and India’s national identity, 58; and Jaipur Literature Festival, 3; magical realism in, 46, 51, 53–57, 59, 63; and minor/”fuzzy” collectives, 46, 51–52, 71–82; Mufti on, 62; multitudes and carnal power, 64–71; narrator’s search for “third principle,” 51, 59–61; and obsession with things as hallmark of freedom, 61–62; and pervasive violence, 120; and pessimism about India’s future, 62–63; plot, 52–53, 69–70, 74–76, 78, 249n81; and recalcitrance of the multitudes, 51, 60; Rushdie on, 73, 247n49; Said on, 52–54; Sangari on, 60, 63; and selfdepravation, 45; and sexuality, 69–70, 74–77; telepathy of narrator, 53–55; and tension between the singular and plural, 58; ties between narrator’s personal history and history of the nation, 52–53, 58–59; and utopian vision, 51, 58, 70. See also multitudes migrancy. See immigrants Mikics, David, 55 Miles, Alice, 91–92, 254n29

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mimesis, 213–20; Auerbach and, 214–15, 282n87; Benjamin on, 216; Bhabha on ambivalence of cultural mimicry, 213; and call center labor, 203, 212, 213, 281– 82n85; Chow on, 27–28, 35; coercive mimeticism, 35–36; colonial mimicry, 30–31, 35, 260n117; Fuchs on, 215; and hypermotivated protagonists in slum fiction, 90; and magical realism, 55; modes of, 282n87; and One Night at the Call Center, 203, 213; and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 191–94, 200, 206; Said and, 278n14; Taussig and, 215–16; and The White Tiger, 96, 110 Mimesis (Auerbach), 214 Mishra, Pankaj, 234n18 misogyny, 78 Mistaken Identity (Sahgal), 44 Mistry, Rohinton, 88 Mitchell, W. J. T., 16, 32, 34 modernity: anthropology of, 114; and caste, 234–35n132; and commodification, 88, 195; crises of, 13; and deathworlds, 125 (see also death); and desire, aspiration, and consumption, 89–90; and fear, 107; Giddens on, 235n27; inequalities and slum life, 85; paradoxes of, 15; “slum magic” and development narratives, 89–90; slums as visible marker of, 94, 104, 106; and spectacle, 195; stereotyping as endemic to, 13 Monbiot, George, 212 The Moor’s Last Sigh (Rushdie), 77, 83 Moretti, Franco, 222–23, 285n93 Moth Smoke (Hamid), 120 mourning, 136–41, 269n104 Mufti, Aamir, 62, 247n42 Mukherjee, Meenakshi, 43–44 Muller, Johannes, 236n6 multitudes, 50–84, 190; and agency, 64–65, 75; and biopolitics, 82–84; and carnal power, 64–71; characteristics of in Midnight’s Children, 50–51; and disorder, 46, 50; and fecundity, 46, 50, 65, 67, 78; and global capitalism, 65–67; Hardt and Negri on multitude’s capacity to challenge neoliberal world order, 46, 57–58; and Hardt and Negri’s Empire, 64–67; hyperreproducibility of, 51, 64–71, 82–83; and inscrutability of the postcolony, 83; and labor, 65–67;

and liberal goals, 46; and magical realism, 55–57; Marx and, 66–67; and Midnight’s Children, 50–84; and minor collectives, 46, 50–52, 71–82; and obsession with things as hallmark of freedom, 61–62; and pessimism about India’s future, 62–63; queer collectives, 71–77; recalcitrance of, 51, 60, 65, 246n28; salience of stereotypes for South Asia, 56–57; and The Satanic Verses, 54; as “singular plurality,” 57–64, 246n24; and slums, 95 (see also slums); and sovereignty, 57, 58; and squalor, 46 (see also squalor); as unmanageable, 51; and vacuity of collective life, 60–61. See also crowdedness; overpopulation Mulvey, Laura, 98, 257n71 Mutua, Makau, 269n106 Nadeem, Shehzad, 208, 212, 281–82n85 Nahal, Chaman, 44 Naipaul, V. S., 2 Nair, Rukmini Bhaya, 13 Nandy, Ashis, 69, 94, 106, 234nn 16,18 Narayan, R. K., 44, 244n135 Narcopolis (Thayil), 88 narrative theory, 23–27 nationalism, 152–55, 184–85, 194, 197. See also Britain; India The Nation and Its Fragments (Chatterjee), 72 nations. See state, the necropolitics, 125–26, 264n25 Negri, Antonio, 46, 57–58, 64–67, 83, 246nn 24,28, 248n59 Neighbors and Jaguar (film), 255n37 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 37, 242n122 9/11, 191, 194–98, 200, 205, 206, 279nn 33,36; Appadurai on, 277n6; and Brick Lane, 218–19. See also The Reluctant Fundamentalist nonviolence (passive resistance), 41–46, 69, 189, 243n130 Nuttall, S., 90 Obama, Barack, 188, 277n7 Okri, Ben, 2 Olukotun, Deji, 5 On the Postcolony (Mbembe), 126 Ondaatje, Michael, 2; Canadian residence of, 120; and human rights discourse,

3 14  I N D E X Ondaatje, Michael (continued) 261n4; impact of stereotypes in Anil’s Ghost, 148–50; and Jaipur Literature Festival, 2; Running in the Family, 131, 265n45; on writing Anil’s Ghost, 149, 150. See also Anil’s Ghost One Night at the Call Center (Bhagat), 49; compared to The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 203–4; and exploitation, 210, 212; humor in, 213; and impersonation and mimicry, 203, 213; and invisibility, 210; plot and characters, 203–4, 208–9, 211; stereotypes in, 209–12; voice, 203–4 Orientalism (Said), 28–29, 239–40n75, 240n83 Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Hanif), 88 Outsourced (film), 49, 208, 209, 213 Outsourced (Zeltserman), 208 outsourcing, 1, 11, 185, 187–91, 202–13, 277n5; Adiga on, 187, 276–77nn 2,3; call-center genre, 49, 208, 212; as economic coercion, 188; and ethics, 188; and exploitation, 211–12, 281n84; and impersonation and mimicry, 203, 212, 213, 281–82n85; list of novels and films depicting, 208; Obama on, 277n7; and self-promotion, 208; and terror, 187–88. See also One Night at the Call Center overpopulation, 37, 42, 46, 47, 82–84, 174–76. See also crowdedness; fecundity; multitudes Pakistan, 189, 205–6 Pallister, David, 261n3 Pamuk, Orhan, 2 Parry, Benita, 239n75 Partition, 53, 74, 189, 244–45n135 A Passage to India (Forster), 219 passivity, 42–46, 243n130, 244n135. See also fate; nonviolence Patočka, Jan, 268n95 Perfect, Michael, 155, 176–78, 185 Pickering, Michael, 13, 18, 26 pietà, 143–44 Plainwater (Carson), 146 planetarity, 226 politics: and assimilation and citizenship in Britain, 161–63; cultural stereotypes and colonial power, 28–31; English language and India’s nationalist movement, 38–41; and the “national-

popular” (Gramsci’s concept), 272n15; “necropolitics” (Mbembe’s concept), 125–26, 264n25; and process of subjectification, 30; synchrony between stereotypes, English as literary language of global literature, and global power relations, 38. See also biopolitics, biopower postcolony, 28–31, 230; Appiah on postcolonial pessimism, 133, 266n54; and countercultures, 54; and difference between secure and insecure lives, 134 (see also security); failure of, 42, 51, 62, 69–71, 77, 131 (see also Anil’s Ghost; Midnight’s Children; The White Tiger); and fecundity and preoccupation with reproduction, 77; and fetish aspects of stereotypes, 27–33; and freedom, 189–90; inscrutability of, 3, 70, 83; and Jaipur Literature Festival, 4–5, 8; and magical realism, 246n21 (see also magical realism); and masculine effeminacy, 44; and multitudes’ capacity for challenging neoliberal world order, 46, 57–58; and multitudes of the poor, 80–82 (see also Midnight’s Children); and optimistic views of global capitalism, 87; as place of subalternity, 130, 148 (see also subalternity); postcolonial crypt and cultural melancholia, 135–41, 150; and responsibility, 51; and Said’s Orientalism, 28–29; and Slumdog Millionaire, 98; slums as metonym for the terrain of the postcolony, 91; and sovereignty, 114; and textual worldliness (Said’s concept), 29–30; and use of English language, 37–38, 40; and violent death, 47–48, 119–50 (see also Anil’s Ghost) poverty, 47, 175; and Brick Lane’s representation of Bangladesh, 174–75; collectives of ghetto dwellers in Midnight’s Children, 71–74, 80–82; and “dead capital” of slums, 107–8; and English language, 37; and exploitation, 107; fictional poverty tours, 88, 90–99, 252n21, 253n25, 254n29; hunger, 11, 38, 42–45, 47; and India’s anticolonial movement, 42–43; reality slum tours, 99, 116–17, 257nn 72,73, 258n75, 260n114. See also Slumdog Millionaire; slums; squalor

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Powell, Enoch, 161–64 power: Casanova on relations of power and the “world republic of letters,” 227– 28; cultural stereotypes and colonial power, 28–32; and death, 125–26; and global fiction, 223–24; and migrancy and biopolitics, 156; stereotypes and consolidation of cultural power, 21; stereotypical discourse and the enunciation of power through representation, 30; and voyeurism, 92 The Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 100 Prabhakaran, Velupillai, 129 Prasad, Chandra Bhan, 3 Prashad, Vijay, 243n130 Pratt, Mary Louise, 92 Prouty, Richard, 253n26 psychology, 17–19; psychoanalytic paradigms, 12, 25, 32–33, 48, 98, 261n5, 266n70; social psychology, 17–19, 237nn 15,32, 238n41 Public Opinion (Lippman), 19 race: and British citizenship, 162–63; controversies over cultural and racial authenticity at Jaipur Literature Festival, 4–5; and cultural authority and Brick Lane controversy, 154–57; ethnic stereotyping and identity, 33–36; Fanon on racial stereotyping, 17, 235n15; figure of the native, 32, 235n15, 256n55; and intersection of biology and culture, 159, 273n20; Mitchell on effectiveness of stereotypes in racial film imagery, 32; race riots in Britain, 167, 170, 274n33; racial stereotyping and immigrants, 167–74 (see also Brick Lane); and sex, 162, 273n32 Rao, Anupama, 244n132 Rao, Raja, 42 Ratti, Manav, 270n113 readers and reading: Amossy’s analysis of “stereotyped reading,” 241n87; and ethics of reading global literature, 9, 11–12, 221–31 (see also ethics of global literature; voyeurism); interpretative engagement and textual worldliness, 29–30; Iser’s theory of reader response, 224–25; and meaning, 224–25; Moretti on “distant reading,” 283n93; stereotypes as about readers as well as

stereotyped others, 10, 30; and terror and outsourcing in transnational literature, 190; and transnational novels as cultural artifacts, 283n98 realism, 219; and Brick Lane, 155, 159, 271n10, 275n58; in film, 252n10; in Victorian fiction, 34; and visual force of stereotyping, 34 Reality Tours and Travel, 99, 257n73, 258n75 The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid), 48, 191–202; compared to One Night at the Call Center, 203–4; ending of, 213; Medovoi on, 206; narrative undecidability, 204; narrator’s voice, 203, 206; plot, 191–92, 196–97, 199, 204–5; relation between terror and work, 48–49, 206, 207; and shame, 199–202; speculative ending of, 204–6; and terror, impersonation, and mimicry, 191–94, 200; and terror as spectacle, allegory, and affect, 194–202; and xenophobia, 205–6 repetition: and allegory, 198; analysis of stereotypes and resulting complicity in their reproduction, 36; repetitive chains of stereotypes, 12, 31–32; and stereotypical colonial discourse, 31–32 reproduction. See crowdedness; fecundity; multitudes; overpopulation Riffaterre, Michael, 23–24 Roberts, Gillian, 267n93 Roberts, Gregory David, 234n8 romance, 88–89, 98–99, 252n10 “rooster coop” image of slum life, 105–6, 111 Rosello, Mireille, 21, 238n38 Roy, Ananya, 91, 108, 253n23, 260n113, 261n143 Roy, Anuradha, 2 Roy, Arundhati, 120, 234n132 Roy, Sanjoy, 233n3 Running in the Family (Ondaatje), 131, 265n45 Rushby, Kevin, 91 Rushdie, Salman, 2, 37, 230–31, 234n18; Brennan on, 251n120; and Brick Lane controversy, 152, 154; controversy over works, 5, 7–8, 247n42; critique of India’s developmental narrative and nationalist politics, 51, 61, 247n42;

3 16  I N D E X Rushdie, Salman (continued) diaspora novels, 83–84; and failure of softer side of Indian nationalist dream, 69–70; and Gandhi, 45–46, 249n69; The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 76–77, 83; on how newness enters the world, 54; and Jaipur Literature Festival, 3, 5, 7–8, 234n18; on Midnight’s Children, 73, 247n49; The Moor’s Last Sigh, 77, 83; sexuality in novels of, 71–77; Shalimar the Clown, 196; on Slumdog Millionaire, 109; on stereotypes, 231; women in novels of, 77–80, 250n101, 251n112. See also Midnight’s Children; The Satanic Verses Saarinen, Esa, 252n20 Sacred Games (Chandra), 88 Sadana, Rashmi, 3, 233n3, 235n19 Sahgal, Nayantara, 44 Said, Edward, 240nn 79,84; on Midnight’s Children, 52–54; and Orientalism, 28–29, 239–40n75; and representational effect of stereotypes, 29; and textual worldliness, 29–30, 235n28, 278n14 Salaam Bombay! (film), 88, 252n10 Sangari, Kumkum, 60, 63 The Satanic Verses (Rushdie): as diaspora novel, 83; fatwa and violence following publication, 5; and how newness enters the world, 54; and Jaipur Literature Festival, 5; magical realism in, 80; plot and characters, 76; sexuality in, 76; Spivak on women in, 77 Saturday (McEwan), 196 Satyanaraya, K., 234n16 Scanlan, Margaret, 128–29 Schaff, Adam, 18 Schweinitz, Jorg, 17–18, 23, 34, 237n30, 238nn 54,55 security, 9, 230; and chain of stereotypes, 12; difference between secure and insecure lives, 134; and impossibility of dying in place of another, 142; and slum stereotypes, 100–108 Sedgwick, Eve, 46, 73–74, 202 Selvadurai, Shyam, 120 Sen, Amartya, 275n54 Sen, Rajyashree, 4 Sengupta, Shyamal, 92 Seth, Vikram, 2

Sexton, Jared, 273n20 sexuality, 76–77, 242n105; in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 76–77; homosexuality, 13, 71–77; in The Moor’s Last Sigh, 77; relationship between race and sex, 162, 273n32; in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 199; in The Satanic Verses, 76 The Shadow Lines (Ghosh), 120 Shalimar the Clown (Rushdie), 196 shame, 199–202, 211–12, 280n56 Shame (Rushdie), 120 Shamsie, Kamila, 120 Sharpe, Jenny, 12 Shohat, Ella, 34 Siddiqi, Yumna, 122, 124, 143, 263n19 Sidhwa, Bapsi, 44, 120, 244n135 Singh, Khushwant, 44, 244n135, 259n96 Sinha, Indra, 3, 88 Sinha, Mrinalini, 243n126, 250n93 Slaughter, Joseph, 123 Slemon, Stephen, 56 Slumdog Millionaire (film), 47, 85–118; beggar’s camp scene, 106–7; characters, 86, 88–89, 97–98, 102; contrast to The White Tiger, 89, 98, 111; controversy generated by, 91–92, 253n28; and entrepreneurship/opportunism, 87, 89–90, 109–10, 259–60n113; and ethnography, 93; and failure of promise of globalization, 97–98; fate of lead actress, 254n34; and filth/excrement, 102–3, 258n89; game show scenes, 86; Giridharadas on, 87; and hypermotivated protagonist, 90; and myth of self-making, 87, 251–52n5; opening scenes, 102–3; plot, 86, 88–89, 97–98, 102; Prouty on, 253n26; real locations in, 257n62; reviews of, 91–92, 98–99, 259–60n113; as romance narrative, 88–89, 98–99, 252n10; Rushdie’s critique of, 109; and “slum magic,” 109–10; success of, 251n4, 256n61; and voyeurism, 92, 97, 252n21, 254n29; and vulnerability of lowermiddle class, 106 slum magic, 89–90, 108–18 slums, 1, 11–12, 42–44, 47, 73, 85–118, 190, 252n20, 260n123; and abject subalternity, 47, 100–108; affective reactions to, 105–6; and animality, 94, 104–5; and anthropological perspective, 92–93, 96, 113; beggar’s camp scene of Slumdog

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Millionaire, 106–7; and Brick Lane’s representation of Bangladesh, 174, 175; collectives of ghetto dwellers in Midnight’s Children, 71–74, 80–82; and community, 47, 90, 112–13; as the converse of civilization, 105; and criminality/cunning, 47, 86–90, 100; and “dead capital,” 107–8; and desire, aspiration, and consumption, 89–90, 252n20; and disorder, 101–3; and dissent, 115–16; and divide between tourists and vagabonds, 87; and entrepreneurship/opportunism, 85–90, 99; examples of contemporary films and fiction, 88; and exploitation, 107, 117; fear, abjection, and affective life, 100–108; fictional poverty tours, 88, 90–99; and filth, 90, 94, 101–4, 258nn 88,89; and identity, 104; and literacy, 115–16; luxury developments in, 256n49; and megacities, 91, 253n23; and modernity, 94, 104, 106; and other stereotypes of underdevelopment, 94; reality slum tours, 99, 116–17, 257nn 72,73, 258n75, 260n114; “rooster coop” image of slum life, 105–6, 111; “slum magic” and development narratives, 89–90, 108; and social mobility, 89, 93, 96, 256n55; and split between over- and underdevelopment, 96, 97; sublime ideology of slum stereotype, 255n45; UN definition of, 258n79. See also Slumdog Millionaire; The White Tiger Smith, Adam, 211 social psychology, 17–19, 237nn 15,32, 238n41 So Many Hungers (Bhattacharya), 44 Soni, Ayush, 234n18 Soueif, Ahdaf, 2 South Asia, 97, 230; collectivity as a cultural group, 22; difficulties of representation, and Jaipur Literature Festival, 6; and English language and cultural politics, 36–41; and pervasive violence, 134–35 (see also Anil’s Ghost; death); and pursuit of freedom, 49, 50, 189–90; and “slum magic,” 113–14; and split between over- and underdevelopment, 96, 97 (see also India: as divided nation); stereotypes engendered by India’s anticolonial movement, 41–46. See also Bangladesh; India; Pakistan; Sri Lanka

sovereignty, 57, 58, 114, 125, 126, 150, 260n123 Soyinka, Wole, 2 spectacle: and Jaipur Literature Festival, 3, 7; and terror, 194–96, 207, 279nn 33,36,37 spectrality of transnational labor, 202–13 Spindler, William, 246n20 Spinoza, Baruch, 57, 246n28 spirituality, 164–65 Spivak, Gayatri, 11, 92, 223, 264–65n39; and human rights discourse, 261n4; and Jaipur Literature Festival, 8; on magical realism, 80; and readers’ confrontation with the “fantasmatic Asias,” 30; on Said’s Orientalism, 240n83; and subalternity, 117, 130, 131, 132, 240n83, 265n43; and teleopoesis, 228–29; on terror as affect, 196, 199, 280n46; on women in The Satanic Verses, 77; and worlding, 235n28 squalor, 1, 11, 230; and Brick Lane’s representation of Bangladesh, 174; and English language, 37; and hunger stereotypes, 42; and India’s anticolonial movement, 43; and multitudes, 46; and slums, 90, 94, 101–4, 258nn 88,89 Sri Lanka, 141; civil war, 42, 47, 119–50; Daniel on transformation of landscape by violence, 271n131; as a deathworld, 127–30; difficulty of accounting for casualties, 261n1; and fear, 146; as foil for West’s sense of stability, 120; impact of Ondaatje’s portrayal, 148–50; Lawrence on, 119; mass violence (19582009), 262nn 2,3; and subaltern aesthetics and global maps of injury, 130–35. See also Anil’s Ghost Sri Lanka (Tambiah), 261n1, 262n2 Stam, Robert, 34 Stanhope, Lord, 13, 236n7 Stanton, Katherine, 122 state, the: Anderson on the nation as imagined political community, 19; and biopolitics, 156; and convergence of capitalism and print technology, 14; Gramsci on the “national-popular,” 272n15; “magic of the state,” 113–14; rise of the nation-state, 14; state violence, 125–26, 135, 279n43. See also sovereignty

3 18  I N D E X state of exception (Agamben’s concept), 125, 126, 263nn 21,22, 264n27 stereotypes, 1, 7, 93, 213, 221, 236n6, 241n86; and aesthetics, 23–27; ambivalent nature of, 1, 13, 30–32, 44–45, 57; Barthes’s critique of use in literature, 24–25; and biological categories of difference, 156; changing meaning, 12, 16; circulation of, 38; of civilizational backwardness, 9; and clichés, 18, 24; and cognitive social psychology, 17–19; of crowdedness (see crowdedness; multitudes); cultural relations and representational effect, 29; and cultural theorists, 19–23; of death (see death); definitions/descriptions, 16–19, 234n13; and English language used in South Asian literature, 36–41; fetishistic aspects of, 27–33, 98, 114, 195, 217, 257n71; of filth (see squalor); as formulaic and speculative (repeating the same/reproducing difference), 10, 16, 35; functions in literature, 23–27; and global surveillance, 92, 251n124; of hunger (see hunger); invention of stereotype printing, 13–16, 236nn 6,7; and Jaipur Literature Festival, 5–6, 8; and melding of real and fantastic worlds, 5–6, 10, 57 (see also magical realism); of migrancy (see immigrants); and mimesis (see mimesis); Mitchell on effectiveness of stereotypes, 32; mobility of, 6–7, 12; multiple levels of function, 27–28; mutability of, 20–21, 25, 27, 221; new realities/lifeworlds engendered by stereotypes, 26–27; and Orientalism, 28–29; origin of term, 12; origins in early life experiences, 25–26; of outsourcing (see outsourcing); as part real and part phantasmic, 1, 10, 11, 93, 202, 213, 228, 231; and the postcolony (see postcolony); and prejudice, 16, 17; and preservation, production, and proliferation of cultural knowledge, 21; and race/ethnicity (see race); and relations between “self ” and “other,” 9, 10, 26, 30, 219–20, 241n86; and repetition, 10, 23–24, 31–32, 36; repetitive chains of, 12, 31–32; Rushdie on, 231; Said and, 28–29; Schweinitz on conceptions of, 17–18;

of slums (see slums); stereotype of stereotypes, 36; stereotypes engendered by India’s anticolonial movement, 41–46; synchrony between stereotypes, English as literary language of global literature, and global power relations, 38; of terror (see terror); ubiquity of, 17, 21, 25–26; of uneven global development, 9, 93 (see also slums); visual force of, 33–36; of world divided into dangerous and safe zones, 9 (see also security); worlding of, 10 Stoler, Ann, 241n105, 273n32 subalternity: and death, 131–33, 141–44, 265n49; and ethics, 117, 121, 133, 141–44; Kipling and Gunga Din stereotype, 229–30; and political violence in Sri Lanka, 119–50 (see also Anil’s Ghost); and poverty tourism, 92–93; and responsibility toward the other, 141; and slums, 47, 117 (see also slums); Spivak on, 130, 132, 240n83, 265n43; and stereotypes of South Asian passivity, 44–45; subaltern aesthetics in Anil’s Ghost, 130–35; subaltern melancholia, 48; and voyeurism, 92; and The White Tiger, 253n27; and women in Bangladesh, 178; and works at Jaipur Literature Festival, 3 Suleri, Sara, 48, 250n101 Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari, 131, 132, 265n49 Syed, Nafees Asiya, 278n8 Tajfel, Henri, 18 Tambiah, Stanley, 261n1, 262n2 Taussig, Michael, 113–14, 215–16 Taylor, Mark, 252n20 teleopoesis, 228–29 terror, 1, 2, 11, 12, 42, 48–49, 135, 187–220; Adiga on, 187, 276–77nn 2,3; and affect, 194–202, 279n27, 280n46; Ahmed on, 280n49; and allegory, 197–201; and Anil’s Ghost, 128–29; Appadurai on, 277n6; and Brick Lane, 184, 185; and development, 188–89; Devji on, 206–7; and English language, 37; and genre, 212; and global risk economies, 206–7; Jameson on, 278n27; relation between terror and work, 48–49, 188–89, 206,

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207, 276–77nn 2,3; and selflessness, 208; and shame, 201–2, 280n56; as spectacle, 194–96, 207, 279nn 33,36,37; and state violence, 279n43; terrorism, impersonation, and mimicry in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 191–94. See also The Reluctant Fundamentalist Tharoor, Shashi, 45 Thayil, Jeet, 3, 5, 88 Thottam, Jyoti, 233n3 Tilloch, Alexander, 13, 236nn 6,7 Tomkins, Silvan S., 201 Torok, Maria, 136–37, 266n68 Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Sedgwick), 73–74 tourism: fictional poverty tours, 88, 90–99, 253n25; reality slum tours, 99, 116–17, 257nn 72,73, 258n75, 260n114 Train to Pakistan (Singh), 44, 244n135 transnational literature. See literature, global/transnational/world trauma: and Anil’s Ghost, 136–41, 267n84; as a narrative event, 267n88; and postcolonial crypt and cultural melancholia, 136–41 travel writing genre, 92–93 Turpin, Adrian, 89 Tyree, J. M., 108 Untouchable (Anand), 42 utopianism: and Brick Lane, 182–83; and literacy and dissent, 116; and magical realism, 55; and Midnight’s Children, 51, 58, 70; and optimistic views of global capitalism, 87; and teleopoesis, 228–29; utopian ethics and transnational literature, 226–27 Valmiki, Omprakash, 3 Van der Mey, J., 236n6 Victorian fiction, 34 violence, 47; anti-immigrant activism and terrorism, 159–60; beggar’s camp scene of Slumdog Millionaire, 106–7; and connection between fear and abjection, 100–101; difficulty of accounting for casualties in ethnic conflicts, 122–24, 261n1, 262n3; and freedom, 189; and Partition, 189; “rooster coop” image of slum life, 105–6, 111; state

violence, 125–26, 135, 279n43; violent entrepreneurship in The White Tiger, 89, 96–97, 111. See also Anil’s Ghost; death; Sri Lanka; terror visual force of stereotypes, 33–36 Viswanathan, Gauri, 242n122 voyeurism, 9, 91, 92, 97, 116–17, 252n21, 254n29, 257n71. See also tourism Waiting for the Mahatma (Narayan), 44, 244n135 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 37, 217, 225–26 Way, Chris, 99 The White Tiger (Adiga), 47, 85–118; and Booker Prize, 85, 257n61; characters, 87, 94–95, 103, 108–12; contrast to Slumdog Millionaire, 89, 98, 111; controversy generated by, 91; ending of, 97; and entrepreneurship/opportunism, 87, 89, 108–9, 111–12, 261n131; and figure of the native, 256n55; and filth/ excrement, 103, 104; and hypermotivated protagonist, 90, 108; and India as a divided nation, 93–97, 255n41; Jeffries on, 253n27; letters to Chinese premier as narrative device, 87, 96; and literacy, 115–16; and London Book Fair, 251n4; murder of protagonist’s employer, 89, 96–97, 111; plot, 87, 89, 96, 103, 110, 111–12; protagonists’ slum experience, 103–4, 255n46; reviews of, 93; “rooster coop” image of slum life, 105–6; and “slum magic,” 110–11; train stations and luck machines, 114; and vulnerability of lower-middle class, 106, 255n46 Wilson, Andrew, 236n7 Winfrey, Oprah, 3–4, 5, 233n8 women: and biopolitics, 172–73; in Brick Lane, 163–67, 172–73, 275n54; and Brick Lane controversy, 153; and choice between education and spirituality, political activism and domesticity, 79; collectives of working women in Midnight’s Children, 71–74, 77–80; and India’s nationalist movement, 79, 164–65, 243n130; maternity and domesticity, 79, 163–67, 172–73, 275n54; in The Satanic Verses, 77; stereotypes of Indian femininity, 164–67

3 20  I N D E X The World, the Text, and the Critic (Said), 29, 235n28 worlding, worldliness, 235n28; and language, 25; and symbiosis of textual and visual codes, 34; and terror, 197; textual worldliness (Said’s concept), 29–30, 235n28, 278n14; worlding of world literature, 222 world literature, 34, 216, 222–26,

283n93. See also literature, global/ transnational/world Young, Robert, 239n75, 242n105, 273n32 Zeltserman, Dave, 208 Žižek, Slavoj, 195, 252n20, 255n45, 260n126, 279n33 zombies and zombie work, 211, 213