Browsing by Author "Vadde, Aarthi"

“Computable Worlds: The Novel in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism” examines the rise of the data economy from a literary perspective. Coined by Shoshana Zuboff in 2019, the term surveillance capitalism names the large-scale collection and analysis of personal data to predict and control consumer behavior. This dissertation argues that the rise of consumer surveillance has brought about significant transformations in twenty-first century fiction. I show how contemporary novels by J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Tao Lin, Caroline Kepnes, Lauren Oyler, Dennis Cooper, Ruth Ozeki, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Natasha Stagg anatomize hidden assumptions about the boundaries of privacy, the yearning for recognition, and the fear of exposure in computationally surveilled environments, or what I call “computable worlds.” Along the way, I revisit canonical theories of the novel to argue for an affinity between novelistic discourse and the culture-wide exposure endemic to surveillance capitalism.

Although discussions of computation abound in literary criticism, literary scholars have yet to examine how the business of consumer surveillance has shaped cultural production. “Computable Worlds” addresses this intellectual gap by showing how the internet’s current organization as a surveillance system molds social sensibilities and shapes aesthetic production and reception. By increasing what people can know about one another at any given moment, and by producing subjects trained to maximize their visibility, surveillance capitalism has led to a rapid shift in social relations without ready norms to guide subjects. Combining close readings of novels, examinations of data companies’ managerial literature, and reflections on the structure of the literary field, “Computable Worlds” maps the affective atmospheres of the surveillance economy that shapes social life and culture today. To do so, I identify four key aspects of computable worlds: prediction, creepiness, lurking, and ratability.

“Cruel Operators: History, Empire, and Affect in the Global Anglophone Novel,” reanimates and repoliticizes the idea of “cruel aesthetics” within contemporary literature by placing cruelty at the crux of global capitalism’s operational antihumanist logic. Historicizing this logic, the project uses a more nuanced definition of the field of Global Anglophone literature as a space to contend with the economic, racial, and emotional legacies of empire. In turn, affective and aesthetic readings of the diverse novels of Jamaica Kincaid, W.G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Rachel Cusk as Global Anglophone, rather than British, allows for a criticism of global capitalism that is grounded within legacies of empire. The project shows how Jamaica Kincaid’s and W.G. Sebald’s focus on everyday cruelties and historical anachronisms reestablish narrative connections between the networks of violence between colony and empire. It also illustrates how Kazuo Ishiguro’s characters connect the mental and physical servitude within imperial power dynamics to current conditions of work. Finally, locating Rachel Cusk’s novels within a financialized world shows the ubiquitous anxiety of neoliberal present. While the project embraces the universalism of capitalist realities and their imperial foundations, it is only through the concrete expressions and everyday realities of life that the universal architecture of global capitalism can be assessed. Ultimately, linking colonialism with contemporary capitalism formally carves out new “ways beyond” the erasure, paralysis, and the anxiety of the crushing force of dominating world-systems by embracing a politics of refusal, allyship, solidarity, and the bolstering of a “collective intelligence” that comes from the systematic appraisal of cruel aesthetics.

This dissertation addresses the entanglement of work, identity, aesthetics, and geopolitics in the writings of three modernist authors: Claude McKay (1890-1948), Yi Sang (1910-1937), and Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). It focuses in particular on these writers’ explorations of idleness in their narratives, both thematically and formally. As such, it intervenes in scholarly discussions on the importance of labor and work to modernist artists. The contexts of colonial and racial history are foregrounded for their significance to the authors’ creative explorations of idleness, and in this way the dissertation also contributes to fields of comparative literature and postcolonial literary studies.The primary works addressed are Claude McKay’s novel Banjo (1929), Yi Sang’s short fictional narrative “Wings” (1936), and Samuel Beckett’s early novel Murphy (1938), as well as his later trilogy of Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953). The dissertation suggests that, like many twentieth-century modernist writers, McKay, Yi Sang, and Beckett took up work as an important concept for creative investigation. However, it argues that their interests in fact lie less with work itself than they do with idleness—a concept that capitalist ideology would define negatively in terms of the absence of productive labor but which these writers explore as a positive subjective state of being. As such, their writings powerfully critique the place of work in the modern world and challenge readers to question their own valuations of labor and idleness.

This project charts the emergence of a postrace aesthetic in American fiction. It examines how American novels respond to the pressures of what has been called the paradox of the postrace era: that our images and rhetoric portray a nation moving toward racial equality while our statistics actually reveal the opposite. I argue that through the use of features such as futuristic orientation, racially unmarked characters, and the reconfiguration of racial groupings, postrace novels attempt to unsettle our notions of race – a paradoxical endeavor, for attempts to unsettle a category ultimately invoke it again. Capable of interrogating emergent cultural phenomena, postrace novels provide a crucial vantage point from which we can interpret the shifting operations of race in the 21st century.

This dissertation uses the revolutionary potential of Caribbean religion to theorize black feminism between the two World Wars. It argues that women artists and performers across the diaspora produced ethnographic and creative representations of Haitian Vodou (and its sister religions) in order to formulate a radical and pan-African feminism. Unlike accounts of the savagery and hedonism of a sensationalized “voodoo” perpetuated by white male travelers to Haiti, black women’s narratives of Vodou focused specifically on its status as a theology of resistance. By re-animating apolitical narratives of “voodoo” with their original spiritual provenance in Vodou, women of color laid claim to the political force of the religion behind the largest successful slave revolt in the Western hemisphere.

Over four chapters, the Vodou lens of “Whosoever Doubts My Power” shows that black feminism and black radicalism are inextricable. Following the tradition of Karen McCarthy Brown and Natasha Omi’seke Tinsley, I take the religious forms of the African diaspora as potential sources of feminist political mobilization. Haitian Vodou, hoodoo of the American South, and other Afro-diasporic cosmologies allow women to attain the highest positions of leadership (Marie Laveau), and to follow the example of powerful female spirits (Ezili). My dissertation unpacks the radical underpinnings of Afro-Caribbean religious symbology in works by and about black women. In doing so, I address the gender imbalance in scholarship on interwar figures such as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, which often portrays the black radicalism of the interwar period as an endeavor crafted solely by men. If, as Brent Edwards argues, “black radicalism is an internationalization,” I seek to call attention to the transnational movements of women in this time period, despite their more limited access to international circuits. “Whosoever Doubts My Power” bridges the works of Anglophone, Francophone, and Creolophone women whose paths crossed, collided, or simply ran parallel in the shared transnational dream of the voodoo queen. I also include the life and travels of little-researched figures like the essayist Suzanne Césaire and the performer Florence Emery Jones in order to correct the archival elisions of black women’s contributions to the construction of a Pan-African radical tradition.

At times metaphorical, at other times quite literal, this dissertation argues that Black female artists deployed African-derived religious practice in order to intentionally blur the line between cultural inheritance and invention. These practices were not just a means of deflecting or circumventing racism and misogyny; rather, engagements with New World religions became a world ordering system, a cosmology meant to replace the traditions that had been lost over time and in the Middle Passage. Often, these practices were processes of invention as much as they were processes reclamation. In fact, the power of the voodoo/Vodou lens lies precisely in its liminal status between factuality and invention, between myth and history. In a lacunar archive of the Middle Passage that makes past African traditions unknowable and Pan-African solidarity untenable, Afro-diasporic artists must come to terms with the lost of their histories and communities. However, rather than succumbing to the loss of that realization, Black artists of the interwar period used the idea of Vodou to conjure imagined histories and mobilize imagined communities in the present. It was not so much the end of a worldview as the beginning of one.