Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Postcolonial Literary System: Toward an Ethics of Post-subjectivity

by Shital Kumar Dahal

To account for the interaction between literary and critical works in the making of the postcolonial literary system, this dissertation uses Niklas Luhmann’s version of systems theory for its posthumanist orientation, esp. his sociological rendering of Maturana and Varela’s concepts of system and environment. On the one hand, this approach allows analyzing how postcolonial literary subsystem achieved its distinction within literary system. On the other, it helps pave the way to expand the system’s horizon beyond humans so the subsystem can increase its ability to connect with other systems in the environment and, in turn, ensures its life and increase its longevity. The subsystem achieves all this without jeopardizing its operational prerogative, however allowing structural changes within the subsystem in its own terms. This dissertation is the first attempt at viewing postcolonial literature as an autopoietic system in that it contributes to the ongoing discussion of what belongs to the system. The qualification of belonging to a system is based on communicative potentiality of a text, creative or critical: A text belongs to the system If it has generated conditions of further communication; if it has participated in the ongoing discussion of the relevant topics designated by the system; if it will attract the attention of future postcolonial texts. To be part of the system, a text must make a difference for future communicative events of postcolonial literary system. As a random sampling of the interaction, Mukherjee’s Jasmine, Lahiri’s Namesake, and Desai’s Inheritance of Loss are analyzed. To observe the interaction and to see how each text has contributed to the constitution of the postcolonial literary system, and how, they, in turn, were constituted by the system (making a circle), these three literary texts have been placed alongside some of the prominent postcolonial critical texts, from Fannon and Said through Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, Homi Bhabha, and a few others. By using the systems theoretic lens, it is possible to avoid postcolonial qualification based on origin, as well as primacy of literary texts over critical texts or the reverse. In course of the analysis, a number of issues pertaining to the postcolonial literary systems have been brought to new light: Diasporic experience, resistance, protest movement, culture, identity, and absolute exclusion. On the basis of the survey of the history of subjectivity, this research concludes that postcolonial literary system should take a post-humanist turn and abandon the metaphysics of subjectivity so it can open up to other agencies like non-human animals, machines, etc. This last ethical move is proposed as a post-subjective stance of the postcolonial in that resistance takes the form of overcoming subjectivity and the form of recognizing hybridity so all actors, humans and non-humans, in the network are accounted for their roles.