Affective Insurgencies: Circular Narratives of Conflict in Contemporary South Asian Novels

Abstract

My thesis will explore how our everyday discourses and notions of truth and epistemic validity which we use in a variety of academic disciplines and other contexts can be deconstructed within the textual space of contemporary literature on terrorism. In chapter one, I analyze nineteenth- and twentieth-century theoretical texts in which linguists, philosophers of language, and literary and rhetorical scholars discuss both the functions of language and literature and the relationship between metaphorical discourse and literal discourse. In the following two chapters, I shift my focus to contemporary novels on violent local and transnational conflicts and their devastating effects, focusing specifically on how the circular narrative structures often undermine literal discourses and popular cultural values which stigmatize Muslim, Arab, and South Asian insurgents and terrorists as monsters or subhuman. Analyzing Mahasweta Devi’s contemporary Bengali novel Mother of 1084, I will argue in chapter two that the middle-class protagonist’s thoughts and feelings may help us contemplate how violent conflicts can cause people to suffer from depression, providing us an opportunity to propose a biocultural model of depression from the perspective of an insurgent’s mother. I will connect this notion that the protagonist provides readers a biocultural model as the story unfolds to the nonlinear narrative structure. Likewise, chapter three will also be an argument I make that the circular narrative structures of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows appear to disrupt the legitimacy of popular American narratives of terrorists.