Modernity, violence, the Third World: A reading of contemporary fiction

Subjectivity refers to life's meaningful relation to the self, community and the world. It is what sustains the individual's potentiality to reach out to others, humans and nature, as a person, and gives the individual the freedom worth its name. At the same time, it acts as a channel through which the individual shares in the exteriority of his/her community. We give emergence to the domination/subordination cycle if we suppress this fundamental element of life, accompanied by a system comprised of Subjects (the rulers), subjects (the ruled) and subalterns (the people, who are multiply marginalized). Violence is an unavoidable consequence of such alienated social relation. The rigid hierarchical social relations stemming from the ethos of modernity, and colonialism, this dissertation argues, are inter-connected events, which have remained intact in the post-colonial world. While the crisis brought about by the lack of practices of subjectivity afflicts humanity in the age of technological modernity, the possibility of a more just community is not out of reach. Such possibility can be located in the reflective attitude toward life and the world, as shown to us in history by such figures as Mahatma Gandhi, and by various literary characters discussed in this project. We can see such figures as Saleem in Midnight's Children, Gatuiria's mother in The Devil on the Cross, the judge's father in The Inheritance of Loss, Lillian Gordon in Jasmine, and John Mist in The Tree Bride working toward giving expression to practices of subjectivity in a more just community.