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theses

This dissertation presents the phenomenon of post-decolonization secession and its literature as important new topic and genre for postcolonial studies. It draws on legal documents from international law, human rights law and UN doctrines to examine the paradox within the presumably inalienable, yet context-confined, right of peoples to self-determination. Although in UN’s 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, the first introduction of the right of self-determination in international law, it was set up to be the right of all peoples, it is only practiced as a binding, legal right in the context of decolonization. The UN-assisted decolonization process insists that self-determination happen along colonial borders, and newly independent postcolonial states inherit colonial territories. Postcolonial independence achieved in this manner retains the racial fault lines from the colonial era, which facilitates the reenactment of the dialectics of the settler and the native, hindering the development of a sense of national consciousness. This dissertation reads post-decolonization secession as delayed decolonization endeavor emerging out of strong (ethno)nationalist sentiment. It argues that post-decolonization secession lays bare the conditions and terms of the decolonization process, and of becoming/being postcolonial itself. This study discusses four post-decolonization secession movements—Biafra/Nigeria, Gorkhaland/India, Tamil Eelam/Sri Lanka, and South Sudan/Sudan—alongside five secession literary texts: Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country, Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Dave Eggers’s What Is the What. It traces the evolution of the concept of the self-determination right after 1960 and the world’s changing response to these secession crises in postcolonial regions. The literature not only bears testimony to these shifts but also examines aspects of the situation that the political and legal processes cannot resolve. While politically and legally, secession aspiration is always conflated with state-building, secession literature reminds us that secession movements are first and foremost anti-state projects, especially in the post-decolonization context. Secession literature dwells on this anti-state sentiment and pre-state phase, and suggests “non-state nationalism” as an alternative mode of a people’s political being and a new type of sovereignty.

ETD_5964

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Pei-Ling Hu

doi:10.7282/T3ZW1JD4

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.