Neoliberal Disgust in Aravind Adiga's: The White Tiger.

How does scatology function in postcolonial fiction today? And what might that idiom tell us about neoliberalism as a cynical political rationality sweeping the developing world? Aravind Adiga's exemplary 2008 satire on globalizing India, The White Tiger , parodies how neoliberalism normalizes misan...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 42; no. 3; pp. 169 - 189
Autor principal: Adkins, Alexander
Formato: Literary Criticism
Publicado: Indiana University Press Spring2019
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:How does scatology function in postcolonial fiction today? And what might that idiom tell us about neoliberalism as a cynical political rationality sweeping the developing world? Aravind Adiga's exemplary 2008 satire on globalizing India, The White Tiger , parodies how neoliberalism normalizes misanthropic self-interest as the truth of society and human nature today. Michel Foucault identified this self-interest as a newly emergent form of rational choice, one that shapes human beings into "entrepreneurs of themselves." These subjects are governed by the brutally instrumentalist terms of investment, risk, and cost-benefit. The novel parodies this subject position through the language of neoliberal disgust, a form of scatological rhetoric that inverts the traditionally oppositional function of scatology by rendering the victims of underdevelopment the authors of their own oppression.