Large worlds/small places: Critical cosmopolitanism and stereoscopic vision in the global postcolonial novel.

摘要

This dissertation looks at the new developments in the politics and narrative style of the global postcolonial novel in the most recent works of Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, namely, Fury, The Pickup, Magic Seeds, and Wizard of the Crow, respectively. I note that in varying degrees, these narratives enact a form of commitment to the postcolonial world that is critically cosmopolitan, situated between a liberal ideology of common humanity and a postcolonial outlook championing resistance. This critical cosmopolitanism moves from a discourse of dislocated subjectivity in postcolonialism to one of the multiply-linked subjectivities of globalization. It does not shun the liberatory potential of global discourses, such as modernity, human rights, and feminism, and it does not hold the "national" as the sole form of resistance to global inequities and the neocolonial threat of a globalized world. In fact, the distance found in these narratives from locality, nativity, and cultural specificity, unsettles the condition of postcoloniality and the binary dynamics of imperial centers and (post)-colonial peripheries, notions that are at the basis of established interpretive paradigms for postcolonial narratives.;Taking critical cosmopolitanism as my critical paradigm, instead, I expose in these narratives a desire for globality, namely for a convivial culture and a non-fragmented world, which is attentive nonetheless to the new power relations and the tensions existing in the act of reconciling the local with the global, such as in ethnic conflicts, the plight of illegal immigrants and global strangers, the hegemony of the global "society of the spectacle," and the various activisms on behalf of the global poor and the dispossessed. I contend that the global postcolonial novels in this dissertation envision the "large worlds" that are at the global forefront always in relation to the "small places" that are within and beyond national demarcations and often below visibility. This double and complex view of globalization, which I denote as stereoscopic vision, fashions a mutually informing critique that surpasses the nation, imperial world-views, and postcolonial geopolitics. It expands onto the world and generates its literature in an era of accelerated globalization.