Postcolonial literary system: Toward an ethics of post-subjectivity

Contemporary postcolonial studies as an academic discipline owes a great deal to the explosion of anthologies of critical works in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which had their precursors in Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Edward Said’s works, to name a few. To account for the interaction between literary and critical works in the making of the postcolonial literary system, this dissertation uses Niklas Luhmann’s version of systems theory for its posthumanist orientation. Luhmann’s sociological concept of system On the one hand, this approach allows analyzing how postcolonial literary subsystem achieved its distinction within literary system. On the other, it helps pave the way to expand the system’s horizon beyond humans so the subsystem can increase its ability to connect with other systems in the environment and, in turn, ensures its life and increase its longevity. The subsystem achieves all this without jeopardizing its operational prerogative, however allowing structural changes within the subsystem in its own terms. This is the first attempt at viewing postcolonial literature as an autopoietic system in that it contributes to the ongoing discussion of what belongs to the system. My intervention is primarily theoretical in that I borrow the concept of interaction and communication from Luhmann and argue that it is not geographical location, indigeneity colonial history of a nation, its language, culture, or origin of a text (settler or non-settler colony, postcolony, metropolis, non-colony) that automatically qualifies to be a system element. Rather the qualification is based on communicative potentiality of a text, creative or critical. By “communicative potentiality,” I mean whether the text has engaged with postcolonial themes; whether it has attracted the attention of the system; whether the text in question has generated conditions of further communication. In the same manner, whether this dissertation belongs to the postcolonial literary subsystem depends not only on whether it has participated in the ongoing discussion of the relevant topics designated by the system but also on whether it will generate conditions of further communication, i.e. whether it will attract the attention of future postcolonial texts, either in the form of constructive intervention, problematization, reconfiguration, elaboration of postcolonial topics with new twist. To be part of the system, it must make a difference for future communicative events of postcolonial literary system.
As a random sampling of the interaction, three postcolonial authors’ literary works are analyzed: Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake, and Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. And to observe the interaction and to see how each text has contributed to the constitution of the postcolonial literary system, and how, they, in turn, were constituted by the system (making a circle), these three literary texts have been placed alongside some of the prominent postcolonial critical texts, from Franz Fannon and Edward Said through Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, Homi Bhabha, and a few contemporaries. By using the systems theoretic lens, particularly interaction and communication, we are able to avoid postcolonial qualification based on origin, on the one hand, and primacy of literary texts over critical texts or the reverse, on the other.
In course of the analysis, a number of issues pertaining to the postcolonial literary systems have been brought to new light: Diasporic experience, resistance, protest movement, culture, identity, and absolute exclusion. On the basis of the survey of the history of subjectivity, it is concluded that postcolonial literary system should take a post-humanist turn and abandon the metaphysics of subjectivity so it can open up to other agencies like non-human animals, machines, etc. This last ethical move is proposed as a post-subjective stance of the postcolonial in that resistance takes the form of overcoming subjectivity and the form of recognizing hybridity so all actors, humans and non-humans, in the network are accounted for their roles. An application, as well as further elaboration, of the proposed theory is attempted using the three literary texts.