Neoliberalism, development, and environmental crises in contemporary South Asian Anglophone fiction
Hossain, Md Alamgir
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124666
Description
Title
Neoliberalism, development, and environmental crises in contemporary South Asian Anglophone fiction
Author(s)
Hossain, Md Alamgir
Issue Date
2024-04-17
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Koshy, Susan
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Koshy, Susan
Committee Member(s)
Hassan, Waïl
Rana, Junaid
Byrd, Jodi A.
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Environmental Crises
Neoliberalism
Development
South Asian Anglophone Fiction
Non-linear Time
Temporal Relation
Language
eng
Abstract
This dissertation examines how contemporary South Asian Anglophone fiction intervenes in the discussion of development, counter development, and environmental crises in the Global South. Western development projects that wreak havoc on life and the environment in the Global South put too much emphasis on the present and “expung[e] . . . the past in a gesture of calculated antihistoricism” (Brennan 38). The ideology that informs these projects is grounded on a linear understanding of time that functions by disrupting temporal relation—the multifaceted but harmonious relation between the past, present and future. Although sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and environmentalists criticize western models of development, they rarely pay attention to Western conception of time that forms the basis of capitalist development. My dissertation shows that Contemporary South Asian writers question this normative understanding of time with a view to challenging Western concept of development. I analyze novels by Indra Sinha, Rajat Chaudhuri, Romesh Gunesekera, Tahmima Anam, and Uzma Aslam Khan to trace the ways these writers create a topology of time in their fiction that breaks away from the traditional understanding of linear time. These novels draw on historical past, personal and collective memories, local folktales, and myth to construct temporal relation that counters Western discourse on development through pollution trades, helps create an “exteriority” of capitalism from where to resist the forces of neoliberal development, and facilitates entry into the undercommons to challenge the forces of human and ecological destruction. The deployment of time as a decolonial principle in contemporary South Asian Anglophone fiction marks epistemic delinking from Western metaphysics of time. This non-linear understanding of time enables contemporary South Asian writers to counter and offer alternatives to neoliberal development.
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