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theses

ETD_3299

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Shakti Yogeshkumar Jaising

This dissertation brings the tools of literary and cultural analysis to the study of contemporary neoliberalism, a globally dominant political, economic and moral vision that limits the regulatory role of government while expanding the reach of capital into social life. While much scholarship on neoliberalism has emphasized the social and material changes it has ushered since the 1980s, my project attends also to its cultural manifestations and ideological dimensions, particularly to the ways in which its utopian free market ideology remakes the present by rewriting histories of colonial domination. Drawing on recent scholarship on neoliberalism— by social scientists like David Harvey, postcolonial and race theorists like Stuart Hall, and literary and cultural historians like Fredric Jameson— I show how contemporary global culture participates in and responds to the rise of neoliberal utopianism. In my introduction, I establish how regional hegemons and global powers like the United States, South Africa, and India adopt neoliberal policies, thereby destroying not only existing public assets but also collective memory. Considering an array of Anglophone texts from the last two decades—including U.S. journalism and travel writing, South African memoir and testimony, award-winning Indian novels, and internationally-acclaimed cinema— each of my following chapters tracks the new narratives of the present and the past that have arisen in these national contexts in conjunction with their turn to neoliberal methods of profit-making and state-building. I reveal how the uncritical revival of colonial discourse, the recasting of colonial violence as moral failure, and the exoticization of colonial-era intercultural contact, lead to the radical rewriting of histories of colonialism, at the very moment when only a frank acknowledgement of these histories and their ongoing legacies might enable us to begin to repair the damage done. As opposed to theories of globalization that emphasize the radical newness of the contemporary geopolitical order, my dissertation illustrates both the discontinuities and continuities between the regimes of domination that characterize the neoliberal present and the period of European colonization.

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000061292

doi:10.7282/T3FT8KCD

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