Fiction, theory, and social justice: Dispropriative readings

This dissertation examines the question of social justice through a close reading and analysis of four key terms in the cultural and political landscape: humanity, rights, enlightenment, and democracy. I explore each term to reveal its enabling limits and the possibilities that emerge when these limits are engaged. Focusing on fictional and theoretical texts that participate in a rethinking of ethics and responsibility, I investigate the important and illuminating ways in which fiction and theory intervene in the world, and how each supplements the other. Such an inquiry calls for a mode of reading attentive to alternative understandings of political categories and the possibility of political engagement. In my dissertation, I develop a dispropriative reading practice that actively ignores the main system of meaning and follows instead the marginalized messages within texts. I call my readings dispropriative not only to emphasize the Levinasian notion of interrupting the epistemological with the ethical but also because one of the purposes of my project is precisely to interrogate the boundaries of the proper. Crucial to this argument is the recognition that fiction engages critically with the world around it, not only questioning current norms but also refiguring existing structures and discursive pathways through the force of the imagination. My work is comparative in nature and scope, bringing together texts from various parts of the world: Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun, J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, Abderrahmane Sissako's film, Bamako, and Manjushree Thapa's The Tutor of History. I bring these texts into dialogue with postcolonial theory and poststructuralist thought to highlight the complex interaction of fiction and theory.