United States of Banana (2011), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Fury (2001): Portrait of the Writer as the ‘Bad Subject’ of Globalisation

Abstract

In a world which seems increasingly globalised, thanks to modern information systems and easy travel, the postcolonial paradigm of analysis applied to literature from formerly colonised countries or by formerly subject peoples fails to take into account sufficiently the geopolitical reconfiguration attendant on the historical process that is globalisation. Some recent novels by writers most frequently categorized as postcolonial, seem to be seeking to engage with the ‘new world order’ in original and challenging ways. They focus on the writer, whether as narrator or protagonist, or both, as a site of resistance to the globalised status quo promoted by late capitalism and its ramifications in the heart of the new empire, notably New York, but also on its margins in Africa, Porto Rico or the South Seas. The complex formal features of such novels, their elaborate literary craftsmanship and overwhelming self-consciousness hamper their easy insertion into the postcolonial paradigm, suggesting, at first sight, a more postmodern preoccupation with the aesthetic. At the same time, they evince a conflicted nostalgia for the Romantic imagination which enables the writer figures they portray to openly resist interpellation by the dominant ideology as well as to invent alternative realities. Refusing to occupy subject positions in relation to an ideological norm, whether postcolonial or global, their counter narratives take their impetus from formal and stylistic originality. The result is an embattled Künstlerroman where defamiliarisation and deconstruction of identity, as much as recognition and growth, are the order of the day.

Keywords

• aesthetics
• capitalism
• globalisation
• hybridity
• ideology
• interpellation