Title: The Politics of Precarity: Contesting Neoliberalism's Subjects in Aravind Adiga's<i>The White Tiger</i>
Abstract: This article focuses on the particular challenge to neoliberalism's self-owning subject found in Judith Butler's notion of precariousness and the shared, bodily vulnerability with the other it suggests, by reading Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008. London: Atlantic) against neoliberal discourses on globalization and the attendant language on human rights. These discourses operate to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of the subject, establishing a frame for who can be perceived as a legitimate subject in society and who cannot. This results in a differential exposure to violence either from others in society or directly from the state, whether through persecution or neglect. By staging and thus demonstrating the functioning of a framework that sets capital as the norm for both the performing of social identity, and for the recognition of others by which the poor are rendered invisible,Adiga's novel subverts the rhetoric of freedom and agency surrounding the neoliberal subject. The novel, therefore, engages the reader in identifying the subaltern in ways not governed by neoliberal discourses, contesting their schemes of intelligibility through a narrator who writes himself into being.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-07-03
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 2
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