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195 Pages·2016·5.53 MB·English

by  Alexander Adkins

Copyright
Alexander Adkins
2016
ABSTRACT

Postcolonial Satire in Cynical Times

by

Alexander Adkins

Following post-1945 decolonization, many anticolonial figures became disenchanted, for
they witnessed not the birth of social revolution, but the mere transfer of power from corrupt
white elites to corrupt native elites. Soon after, many postcolonial writers jettisoned the political
sincerity of social realism for satire—a less naïve, more pessimistic literary genre and approach
to social critique. Satires about the postcolonial condition employ a cynical idiom even as they
often take political cynicism as their chief object of derision. This dissertation is among the first
literary studies to discuss the use of satire in postcolonial writing, exploring how and why some
major Anglophone global writers from decolonization onward use the genre to critique political
cynicisms affecting the developing world. It does so by weaving together seemingly disparate
novels from the 1960s until today, including Chinua Achebe’s sendup of failed idealism in
Africa, Salman Rushdie’s and Hanif Kureishi’s caricatures of Margaret Thatcher’s enterprise
culture, and Aravind Adiga’s and Mohsin Hamid’s parodies of self-help narratives in South Asia.
Satire is an effective form of social critique for these authors because it is equal
opportunity, avoiding simplistic approaches to power and oppression in the postcolonial era.
Satire often blames everyone—including itself—by insisting on irony, hypocrisy, and
interdependence as existential conditions. Postcolonial satires ridicule victims and victimizers
alike, exchanging the politics of blame for messiness, association, and implication. The satires
examined here emphasize that we are all, to different degrees, mutually implicated subjects,
especially in the era of global capitalism. This dissertation thus contests critics who argue that
the subgenre engages in victim blaming, indulges in colonial-era stereotypes about the
developing world, and supports political nihilism. Postcolonial satirists cut a path between the
optimism expected of them and the fatalism they are accused of by offering a third path between
that stifling dichotomy: a mutually implicating, humorous form of social critique that nuances
neocolonial forms of power—including cynicism itself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Betty Joseph, whose sharp attention to detail, thoughtful suggestions,
candor, high standards, and enthusiasm encouraged me to write exactly the project I intended.
Judith Roof has been an indispensable and trustworthy advisor and mentor to me since my first
year at Rice. I cannot thank her enough for her blunt honesty, endless generosity, and unceasing
support every step of the way. Both of these brilliant scholars made this project a joy and a
privilege to write.
Writing is a lonely act one might learn to love and embrace. But learning to love the art
of writing is impossible without the support of loved ones waiting for you after the day’s work is
done (or not done). Sydney Boyd, Abby Goode, Meina Yates-Richard, Sophia Hsu, Niffy
Hargrave, Lindsey Chappell, AnaMaria Seglie, Michael Miller, Rodrigo Paula, Derek Woods—
thank you for your friendship. To Laura Richardson, Seth Morton, and Alanna Beroiza—I am
grateful and lucky to have you in my life (please don’t leave). Kristina McDonald has saved my
life on more than one occasion and been a wonderful friend to me. I owe my still-existent sanity
this past year to Payal Garehgrat, whose enduring support, passion for life, and love have made
this project all the more worthwhile. To my loving mother and father, Luz and John: I will spend
the rest of my life trying to make you proud. I owe everything I have today to both of you. This
dissertation is for you.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract iii

Acknowledgments v

Introduction Cynical Postcolonial Satire: African Beginnings, 1
Theoretical Underpinnings

Chapter 1 Chinua Achebe and the Beautiful Soul 35

Chapter 2 Left Moralism in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses 51

Chapter 3 Hanif Kureishi’s Stylish Nihilism 104

Chapter 4 Neoliberal Narrative in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger 134

Conclusion How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia 159

Notes 173

Bibliography 179
1

INTRODUCTION
Cynical Postcolonial Satire: African Beginnings, Theoretical Underpinnings

“There are two things in Indian history—one is the incredible optimism and potential of the
place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential—for example, corruption. Those two strands
intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.”
—Salman Rushdie1
Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 satirical novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,
epitomizes the genre of writing that titles this introduction. The novel’s protagonist is an
impoverished and unnamed rail worker the third-person narrator refers to only as “the man.”
Armah’s “man” spends the majority of the text trying to avoid the corruption, materialism, and
degradation he sees as rampant in postcolonial Ghana, a place he condemns throughout the novel
in a scatological idiom. His only confidante and refuge is his friend “The Teacher,” whose
philosophy of despair the man contemplates and often enacts in his day-to-day life. When
pondering the hopeful time of anticolonialism in Ghana, Teacher indicts Kwame Nkrumah and
other socialist leaders in Africa for spreading an impossible idealism—a populist optimism that
would eventually lead to the enrichment of few at the expense of many:
How long will Africa be cursed with its leaders? There were men dying from the
loss of hope, and others were finding gaudy ways to enjoy power they did not
have. We were ready here for big and beautiful things, but what we had was our
own black men hugging new paunches scrambling to ask the white man to
welcome them onto our backs. These men who were to lead us out of our despair,
they came like men already grown fat and cynical … How were these leaders to
2

know that while they were climbing up to shit in their people's faces, their people
had seen their arseholes and drawn away in disgusted laughter? (82)
The passage registers the disillusionment and resigned humor of many African authors following
post-WWII decolonization. African intellectuals writing in the 1960s witnessed the rise of
obscene kleptocracies, the comprador elite’s grotesque self-interest, and the abject poverty
following decolonization, catalyzing their often self-loathing and self-satirizing portraits of a
post-independence society betrayed by the high promises of anticolonial rhetoric. Often
criticized for recreating the same colonial-era epithets anticolonial figures wrote against, these
authors used scatological satire to express their frustration toward independence as neither
triumphant nor revolutionary, but as the mere transfer of power from corrupt white elites to
corrupt black elites. But even more important, these texts use excremental language to indict
both the post-independence elite and the underclasses they oppress, deriding the former for
engaging in the unabashed opportunism of the elite cynic, and the latter for resorting to the
reconciled fatalism of the disempowered cynic. Armah’s novel exemplifies the genre of what I
am calling cynical postcolonial satire, for in it both victims and victimizers are not only culpable
(to varying degrees) for the failure of anticolonialism to lead to social revolution, but also
representatives of the disempowering and opportunistic cynicisms born in the wake of what these
authors saw as post-independence failure.
Postcolonial Satire in Cynical Times explores cynical postcolonial satire as a genre both
born of and addressed to the disillusionment following decolonization and other botched
emancipatory projects throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It examines why many
postcolonial authors from the 1960s onward—namely, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Hanif
Kureishi, Aravind Adiga, and Mohsin Hamid—employ satire instead of the literary convention
3

with which they are often associated—sentimental realism. Satire is an effective form of social
critique for the same reason it troubles critics: it cuts a path between the political optimism and
pessimism that stifle contemporary discourse about the developing world. Critics of the subgenre
declare sympathetic realism the most politically responsible means of representing the
postcolonial condition, leading them to accuse satire of cynicism because it does not romanticize
the oppressed or posit a clear normative claim. This scholarly expectation engages in a politics of
blame that oversimplifies power relations and misidentifies new logics of coercion. Satire, by
contrast, exchanges the politics of outrage, guilt, and absolution for a humorous social critique
that stresses messiness, interdependence, and association. If the satires this dissertation examines
highlight the forms of cynicism inflicting post-independence Africa, Thatcherite England, and
global-capitalist India, then the project also opposes the moralistic criticism that claims
postcolonial satire disavows politics, for these texts satirize precisely that disavowal.
This introduction works as a chapter in its own right, showing throughout how Armah’s
novel, its mixed reception, and recent critical theory set the stage for the subject matter, tenor,
and reception of other, seemingly unrelated cynical postcolonial satires. As is the case with many
of the satires discussed here, The Beautyful Ones prompted critics to accuse Armah of both
victim-blaming and self-exempting intellectualism.2 For them, the novel’s dissipative vision
rehashes the colonial rhetoric that framed the colonized as filthy and barbaric. But this vision is
the novel’s point insofar as it also uses excremental tropes subversively, repurposing the rhetoric
of empire that framed the colonized as fundamentally dirty and disordered.3 The Beautyful Ones
identifies the presence of neocolonial politics, materialism, and capitalism in Ghana as abject
residue, critiquing the West as the source of the underdevelopment it attributes to the colonized.
As Armah’s and African literature’s primary satirical device, scatology parodies colonial history
4

and rhetoric, both of which frame the colonized as the chaff blocking the purifying march of
colonial modernity.4
This is not to say that Armah’s novel spares the victim. Far from it. For however much
colonialism in the novel lingers on in Ghana’s comprador elite, neocolonial power also pervades
the whole of society in what Armah calls “the gleam.” A figure for the oscillating disgust and
allure the man feels when looking at the light emitted by Ghana’s poshest hotel (located next to
the country’s most squalid surroundings), the gleam is the novel’s metaphor for the postcolonial
subject’s fall into materialism and corruption in a Ghana driven to cynical self-interest by
scarcity and Western cultural influence. So although the man lacks the “hardness that the gleam
requires,” which is to say the cynical opportunism necessary to get ahead in a corrupt state, most
figures in Armah’s Ghana embrace this hardness quite easily (35). This is because Ghanaians in
the novel’s estimation are subject to a mutually implicating episteme—to the cunning,
consumerism, and misanthropy that for Armah characterize a postcolonial Ghana under the spell
of global capitalism. Hence the novel’s imprecision when characterizing the gleam as a form of
equal-opportunity capitalist subjectivation: “The gleam, in moments of honesty, had a power to
produce a disturbing ambiguity within. It would be good to say that the gleam never did attract.
It would be good, but it would be far from the truth. And something terrible was happening as
time went on. It was getting harder to tell whether the gleam repelled more than it attracted,
attracted more than it repelled, or just did both at once in one disgustingly confused feeling all
the time these heavy days” (10).
For Armah scholar Derek Wright, the scatologist’s metaphor for the expediency and
cynical double consciousness (“a disturbing ambiguity within”) that haunts post-independence
Ghana renders political distinctions impossible, relying as it does on a vague point of reference