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Looking Laterally: Cosmopolitanism a...

Freitas, Vivek A.

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Looking Laterally: Cosmopolitanism and the South Asian Postcolonial Novel.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Looking Laterally: Cosmopolitanism and the South Asian Postcolonial Novel./
Author:	Freitas, Vivek A.
Published:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2017,
Description:	172 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-10(E), Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International78-10A(E).
Subject:	Asian literature. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=10275878
ISBN:	9781369833867

Looking Laterally: Cosmopolitanism and the South Asian Postcolonial Novel.
Freitas, Vivek A.

Looking Laterally: Cosmopolitanism and the South Asian Postcolonial Novel. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2017 - 172 p.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-10(E), Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2017.

This dissertation investigates the idea of "cosmopolitanism" in four South Asian postcolonial novels. In particular, the dissertation traces an arc of the importance of the term from the beginning of the twentieth century to the twenty-first through these selected, key texts. Cosmopolitanism, I argue, has allowed us to "look laterally"---that is, look "beyond" prescribed differences, characterized variously as geography, gender, globally disenfranchised populations, animals, the plurality of human races, nationalities, and literary and cultural traditions. However, such an emphasis on looking "beyond" differences has meant that being "cosmopolitan" has come to be seen as the opposite of having recognizable political affiliations. The rise and celebration of cosmopolitanism has thus come at the expense of a shared sense of community with the capacity for social and political action. Focusing on four novels---Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World (1916), V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River (1979), Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007), this dissertation analyzes the intersections of political and cultural economy in texts explicitly concerned with articulating a cosmopolitan outlook. In each case, I argue that as the term "cosmopolitanism" gains purchase, the ability to develop a shared language of commitment declines.

ISBN: 9781369833867Subjects--Topical Terms:

2122707
Asian literature.

Looking Laterally: Cosmopolitanism and the South Asian Postcolonial Novel.
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245 1 0 $a Looking Laterally: Cosmopolitanism and the South Asian Postcolonial Novel.
260 1 $a Ann Arbor : $b ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, $c 2017
300 $a 172 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-10(E), Section: A.
500 $a Adviser: Modhumita Roy.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2017.
520 $a This dissertation investigates the idea of "cosmopolitanism" in four South Asian postcolonial novels. In particular, the dissertation traces an arc of the importance of the term from the beginning of the twentieth century to the twenty-first through these selected, key texts. Cosmopolitanism, I argue, has allowed us to "look laterally"---that is, look "beyond" prescribed differences, characterized variously as geography, gender, globally disenfranchised populations, animals, the plurality of human races, nationalities, and literary and cultural traditions. However, such an emphasis on looking "beyond" differences has meant that being "cosmopolitan" has come to be seen as the opposite of having recognizable political affiliations. The rise and celebration of cosmopolitanism has thus come at the expense of a shared sense of community with the capacity for social and political action. Focusing on four novels---Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World (1916), V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River (1979), Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007), this dissertation analyzes the intersections of political and cultural economy in texts explicitly concerned with articulating a cosmopolitan outlook. In each case, I argue that as the term "cosmopolitanism" gains purchase, the ability to develop a shared language of commitment declines.
520 $a My first chapter on Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World investigates an early engagement with the possibilities of cosmopolitanism. The novel, as I argue, is Tagore's attempt at "reaching beyond" the confines of home and entering the possibilities of "the world"---a procedure that, in the dissertation, I call "looking laterally." For Tagore, neither what he called the "colorless vagueness" of cosmopolitanism, nor "the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship," could be the "goal of human history" ( Nationalism 34). In this didactic novel, set up as a debate among the principal characters, Tagore attempts to discover a more "natural" connection to "worldliness" or "being in the world." I argue that the novel's fixation on the ideal of "true cosmopolitanism" leads its aristocratic characters to ignore the very (disenfranchised) people on whose behalf they claim to speak and act. Such an analysis of cosmopolitanism as an act of avoidance comes to structure my analysis of the novels in each subsequent chapter.
520 $a My second and third chapters---on Naipaul's A Bend in the River and Desai's The Inheritance of Loss---argue that in each novel "cosmopolitanism" is posited over and against political commitments and functions as an avoidance of the "messiness" of postcolonial politics. Describing Naipaul's protagonist, Salim, as a "vagrant cosmopolitan" I show how London becomes the epicenter of an immigrant cosmopolitanism that longs for "the security" of colonial empires (Literary 170). In Desai's novel, I show how the current generation of South Asian cosmopolitan writers, in tune with academic postcolonial and cultural theories, participate in what I call a "narrative cosmopolitanism." Here, the "worldly" and cultured reader--- not the characters--- is hailed as cosmopolitan through the act of reading and decoding a narrative of "loss" in the former colonies.
520 $a I end with Indra Sinha' Animal's People as a more positive and ethical view of cosmopolitanism. Unlike Tagore's novel, which, too, had attempted to take an ethical position, Sinha's is a "cosmopolitanism from below," organized through the vantage point of the global poor. The novel reminds us that, "All things pass, but the poor remain" (366). Sinha's novel is adamant about the liberatory potential of political and social action in a world faced with global environmental degradation. Such environmental degradation is planetary, even if the instance of the novel is particular: the Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984. I end the dissertation with this novel, because, as I argue, it posits a worldly solidarity, a "true" cosmopolitanism in the face of environmental harm.
590 $a School code: 0234.
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650 4 $a South Asian studies. $3 3172880
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