| Haunting the Tradition of the Novel: Generic Double Play in Diasporic Fiction grows out of an interest in current theories of colonial and post-colonial discourse, especially the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, as well as in global mass migrations and the resulting mixture of cultures that has contributed to the dynamism of new literatures in English. The dilemma for minority literature written under the hegemony of Western culture lies in conflictual impulses around the problem of representation: how to represent the subaltern through generic conventions of the novel that are inevitably implicated in a history of racial and cultural oppression. The dissertation traces this dilemma to the origins of the English novel in the colonial scene of early European modernity, and views the question of representation as a function of literary genealogy and of literary institutions operating without a clear center of authority. It discusses a particular feature--"generic doubles"--in diasporic fiction that plays with novelistic convention in subtle acts of repetition subverted by the specter of difference.;More specifically, the project explores generic doubles in four diasporic novelists: Timothy Mo, George Lamming, Hualing Nieh and Salman Rushdie. Mo's "realist" novels The Monkey King and Sour Sweet are read into the tradition of the eighteenth century novel, amid the generic expectations of the Bildungsroman, adventure tales and the providential romance and their ideological implications within European modernity, thereby resulting in a kind of cultural aporia between tradition and assimilation, between European "originality" and Third World belatedness. Lamming's The Emigrants is read as an engagement with the vernacular feature in the tradition of the novel. The rise of English vernacular in the eighteenth-century is both democratic in appeal and nationalist in its political construction, a split all the more obvious when inherited by diasporic writers like Lamming who introduces Black dialects into the novel and problematizes its language-constructed, racialized subjectivity. The novel as a cultural product of European modernity is interrogated by the Chinese diasporic woman writer Hualing Nieh in Mulberry and Peach, which, through post-modern schizophrenic linguistic play, explores the juncture between patriarchy and modernity that splits the Chinese woman's psyche. The excitement and danger of generic double play are attested to by Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses as the epitome of migrant, diasporic fiction. Rushdie's text consciously mixes styles and genres, and turns both realism and (post)modernism into objects for representation in an attempt to evoke the anti-systemic forces of the migrant communities whose voices are all too easily appropriated in the postmodern age of media manipulation. Turned into a media event itself, however, the text also shows the limitations and the danger in appropriating European avant-garde forms and postmodern techniques. Thus, while the dissertation argues for generic double play as a post-colonial strategy of subversion within the double bind of Caliban's appropriation of Prospero's language, the play itself needs to maintain a supplementary space haunted by the other. |
