Browsing by Author "Khanna, Ranjana"

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

Affects are not reducible to feelings or emotions. On the contrary, Affect Before

Spinoza investigates the extent to which affects exceed, reconfigure and reorganize

bodies and subjects. Affects are constitutive of and integral to dynamic economies of

activity and passivity. This dissertation traces the origins and histories of this definition

of affect, from the Latin affectus, discovering emergent affective approaches to faith,

devotional poetry and philosophy in early modernity. For early modern believers across

confessions, faith was neither reducible to a dry intellectual concern nor to a personal,

emotional appeal to God. Instead, faith was a transformative relation between humans

and God, realized in affective terms that, in turn, reconfigured theories of human agency

and activity. Beginning with John Calvin and continuing through the work of John

Donne, John Milton, and Baruch Spinoza, Affect Before Spinoza posits affectus as a basis

of faith in an emergent Reformed tradition as well as a term that informs disparate

developments in poetry and philosophy beyond Reformed Orthodoxy. Calvin's

configuration of affect turns existing languages of the passions and of rhetorical motives

towards an understanding of faith and certainty. In this sense, Calvin, Donne, Spinoza

and Milton use affectus to pose questions of agency, will, tendency, inclination, and

determinism.

This dissertation argues that post-1980 postcolonial novels reinvent allegory as a narrative-cum-visual form to reimagine the nation in a globalized, neoliberal world. Postcolonial novels have long been read by literary critics as national allegories, their narratives of private lives interpreted as signs of a people’s collective march towards redemption in historical time. This form is taken to have flourished during the movements for independence when postcolonial societies, specifically their newly forming elites, posited nation-building as the utopian horizon of individual struggles. But I find that increasingly, postcolonial novels undermine the older allegorical form. J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Wilson Harris’ The Carnival Trilogy (1985-1990), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) fashion damned worlds in which the actions of characters resist their narrativization into a shared horizon of redemption. I contend that these novels are still allegories, only of a different kind. They assume an aesthetic of critical redemption akin to that of Baroque allegory, which Walter Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, describes as a method for accessing providential meaning in a world from which God has disappeared. These novels pursue redemption through their critique of the now defunct “god” of the sovereign nation as the protector of a people’s unfolding destiny. They register in their narrative fragmentation postcolonial societies’ loss of a collective sense of history in a globalized, neoliberal world. But they also display in the sheer configuration of narrative fragments, captured in an image and read as an allegorical sign unto itself, the historical time experienced by subaltern populations who could never be assimilated into the nation’s teleological progress to begin with. This dissertation identifies the emergence of a new allegorical form in postcolonial literature that invites readers to survey the ruins of the old bourgeois narrative of nationalism for signs of alternative forms of redemptive horizons.

My dissertation offers a whole new method of reading for history in postcolonial novels, one that follows a novel’s development as both a narrative and an image. Each chapter focuses on one of the above four novels, examining its characteristic syntax of narrative fragmentation – parataxis, concretization, and digression, respectively. If this syntax interrupts a novel’s narrative continuity and obscures its narrative history, it simultaneously makes itself visible over time as something to be looked at; it becomes visible as the visual configuration of narrative fragments. Each novel, ultimately, displays in its syntax the substance of its allegorical message. I argue that while my method finds its most adequate object in post-1980 novels, it affords a new insight into the redemptive, utopian impulse of novels from an earlier time that also register in their narrative fragmentation a critique of the nation. I provide Claude Simon’s The Flanders Road (1960) as an example. Coetzee, Harris, and Smith have all cited the Nouveau Roman as a stylistic influence. If these authors inherit Simon’s narrative techniques, their novels, in turn, retroactively make visible the allegorical form of Simon’s 1960 novel.

This dissertation explores the particular significance of South Asia to international literary and political spheres, beginning with the formative moments of modernist internationalism. At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois interrupted his work with the NAACP and the pan-African congresses to write Dark Princess: a Romance. Du Bois's turn to the romance and to India forms the point of departure for my dissertation, for India, both real and imagined, offered modernist intellectuals a space of creative possibility and representative impossibility. The fiction of Cornelia Sorabji, for instance, obfuscates and allegorizes practices of women's seclusion, both to refute imperial feminist solutions and to support her legal activism. From the imperial romance to the anti-racist one, the misrepresentation endemic to the romance genre enables the figuration of a discrepant globe. This modernist practice of transfiguring India, usually in the service of a global political vision, is undertaken both within India as well as outside of it. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, interrupted his leading role in the anti-colonial movement to write Gora, a novel of mistaken identity and inappropriate love, and to mistranslate his own poetry, particularly his Nobel-Prize-winning collection Gitanjali. If realism aims to translate cultural difference, to faithfully carry meaning across boundaries, the romances I consider in my dissertation work instead to mistranslate those differences, to produce a longed-for object beyond cultural specificity. In conversation with postcolonial theorists of Anglophone literary practice, as well as debates around translation in comparative literature, I suggest that we should think about intercultural texts in terms of transfiguration: not the carrying across of meaning from one sign system to another, but the reshaping of culturally specific materials, however instrumentally and inaccurately, in the service of internationalist goals.

This dissertation explores how the contemporary Anglophone novel asks its readers to imagine and respond to disposable life as it emerges in our present-day biopolitical landscape. As the project frames it, disposable life is not just life that is disposed of; it is life whose disposal is routine and unremarkable, even socially and legally sanctioned for such purposes as human consumption, scientific knowledge-production, and economic and political gain. In the novels considered, disposability is tied to excess--to the "too many" who cannot be counted, much less individuated on a case-by-case basis.

This project argues that the contemporary novel forces a global readership to confront the mechanisms of devaluing life that are part of everyday existence. And while the factory-farmed animal serves as the example of disposable life par excellence, this project frames disposability as a form of normalized violence that has the power to operate across species lines to affect the human as well. Accordingly, each chapter examines the contemporary condition of disposability via a different figure of disposable life: the nonhuman (the animal in J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace), the replicated human (the clone in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go), the woman (in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy), and the postcolonial subject (the victim of industrial disaster in Indra Sinha's Animal's People and political violence in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost). Chapter by chapter, the dissertation demonstrates how the contemporary novel both exposes the logic and operations of disposability, and, by mobilizing literary techniques like intertextual play and uncanny narration, offers up a set of distinctively literary solutions to it.

The dissertation argues that the contemporary novel disrupts the workings of disposability by teaching its audience to read differently--whether, for instance, by destabilizing the reader's sense of mastery over the text or by effecting paradigm shifts in the ethical frameworks the reader brings to bear on the encounter with the literary work. Taken together, the novels discussed in this dissertation move their readership away from a sympathetic imagination based on the potential substitutability of the self for the other and toward a form of readerly engagement that insists on preserving the other's irreducible difference. Ultimately, this project argues, these modes of reading bring those so-called disposable lives, which are abjected by dominant social, economic, and political frameworks, squarely back into the realm of ethical consideration.

Dreaming Woman decenters Europeanist histories of psychoanalysis by examining the ways in which forced migration has shaped psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference and evolving modes of feminist practice in Latin America. Home to more psychoanalysts per capita than any other country, Argentina emerged as a site of political asylum during WWII and of exilic dissemination during periods of military dictatorship. Taking Argentina as an exemplary case of psychoanalytic entrenchment that disrupts neat oppositions between Europe and its others, Dreaming Woman reframes the psychoanalytic archive on sexual difference as a discourse on migration. Tracing the coincident rise of psychoanalysis and authoritarianism in Argentina, I examine the role of migrant women, and of discourses on Woman, in establishing new relationships between psychoanalysis and politics.

Through a multimedia archive that includes literature, autobiography, pop culture artifacts, transnational correspondences, clinical case studies, theoretical essays, and artwork, Dreaming Woman approaches psychoanalysis as a heterogeneous set of clinical and cultural practices through which Argentines have articulated distinctive feminist and anti-imperialist projects throughout the twentieth century. These archival materials share a concern for female sexuality as a national problem—that is, a problem tied to national identity and a problem for the nation-state to solve. They also show the transformative impact of clinical encounters with female sexuality, maternal grief, and torture on modern theories of the subject. In view of contemporary anxieties surrounding global migration, the case of Argentina shows that psychoanalysis has always been a political practice forged through exile, one that offers an indispensable conceptual framework for addressing the persistent psychic traces of displacement.

The idiom of madness is ubiquitous in Lebanese cultural production about the country’s 1975-1990 civil war. Despite this, there has been no investigation into what, and how, this madness signifies. In Dwelling in the Barzakh: Mad Archives of the Lebanese Civil War, I work to fill this gap through an analysis of representations of madness in fiction, documentary film, and photography-based art from 1975-2015. I argue that madness is defined multiply throughout this time period, reflecting and responding to the political and social realities, as well as psychic perceptions, of life in Lebanon. The forms of madness articulated through these cultural texts are to be understood as the symptom of a populace dwelling in the barzakh, here defined as a spatiotemporal site of simultaneous rupture and (re)unification.

In what follows, I offer historicized close-readings of Arabic-, French- and English-language cultural texts. Analyzing these texts alongside the political backdrops against which they were produced, I derive theories of madness from the texts, pinpointing how both medium-specificity and the historical contingency of production help inform respective theories of madness in and after war.

Focusing on a diverse set of creative work from Europe, East and South Asia, the Americas, Middle East, and Africa, Minor Measures investigates modalities of world writing through modernist, postcolonial and contemporary transnational literatures in the intertwined moments of imperialism, developmentalism and globalism. It studies the category of world literature as a heterogeneous set of narrative-cognitive forms and comparative modes of gauging from a particular positionality the world-systemic pressures on individual and collective bodies. To this end, Minor Measures focuses on the dynamic and increasingly central role of geoliterary imagination in fashioning a secular hermeneutic that maps the relationships and overlaps between the local and the global, here and there, past and present, self and other. Moreover, it highlights the capacities of the literary aesthetics in configuring local subjectivities, affiliations and histories in relation to the abstract cartographic totality of global modernity. Shuttling back and forth between the two poles, literature as world writing refers to the unconscious framework of representing the contingencies of the lived experience of economically, racially, and geographically differentiated subjects from metropolitan, (post)colonial and diasporic positions.

For a brief moment in feminist time, from 1968 to 1974, women's documentaries were influential in the emerging field of feminist film studies and for feminist activism. By the late sixties feminists had identified visual representation within popular culture, film, and the media as one of the central battlegrounds for women's activism. For feminist filmmakers, documentary, with its alleged superlative grip on truth and transparency, seemed to provide an ideal counterpoint to the perceived mis-representation of "real" women in dominant, narrative cinema. Within seventies feminist film theory, however, scholars elaborated a gender-specific take on the ideological critique of realism that disavowed women's documentary films as naïve, unsophisticated, and complicit with the ideologies of patriarchy and capitalism.

In this project, I recast realism as an unruly and contradictory set of codes and conventions that generate oppositional and revolutionary political documentaries. In contrast to the dominant anti-realist reception of feminist documentaries in seventies feminist film theory then, I argue that these documentaries contain unacknowledged nuance and neglected visions of the political aspirations (however flawed) of second wave feminism. Key figures in feminist political theory, such as Nancy Fraser and Hannah Arendt, shed light on the political and subjective configurations brought forth in several feminist documentaries, including I Am Somebody (1969), Janie's Janie (1971), The Woman's Film (1971), and Joyce at 34 (1972), and Self-Health (1974), which depend rather on second wave aspirations of collectivity and agency, and the power of self-authorship and experience.

The Subaltern Clinic explores a certain legacy of unreason that Sigmund Freud identified throughout the course of his writings as the "death drive," or the compulsion to repeat. In Freud's work, the death drive is often thought as the opposite of the pleasure principle, which situates the pleasure-unpleasure binary at the center of psychoanalytical thinking and Freud's conceptualization of the psyche as well as morality, ethics, and civilization. The Subaltern Clinic traces a legacy of the death drive and a series of thematic concerns that emerge from it, specifically the instability of the pleasure-unpleasure binary that ostensibly upholds the "principle of reason," through a colonial-postcolonial archive. In doing so, the dissertation attends to those subaltern figures who are constituted as the "unreason" of society, particularly the mentally ill, women, and homosexuals.

In particular, the dissertation looks to the intersection of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, specifically to Jacques Derrida's engagements with Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," to argue that deconstruction needs to be thought of as a marginal and politicized form of psychoanalytic thinking, the stakes of which emerge through Derrida's readings of Freud's death drive. The dissertation follows the thread of these readings to consider the problems of difference, violence, sadism and masochism, and anxiety in the work of colonial and postcolonial practitioners of psychoanalysis as well as postcolonial artists and novelists. The Subaltern Clinic makes the argument that an attention to the legacy of the death drive in the postcolonial archive allows for a more robust critique of postcolonial reason, which would attend to questions of ethics and aesthetics.