Dissertation: “Neoliberalism, Development, and Environmental Crises in Contemporary South Asian Anglophone Fiction”

Certified Spring 2021

I am a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My project, “Neoliberalism, Development, and Environmental Crises in Contemporary South Asian Anglophone Fiction,” explores how South Asian literature represents the capitalist exploitation of the environment and the environmental subaltern of the South in the interest of the global North and the Third World elite, and what strategies this literature offers to deal with the environmental challenges brought about by the neoliberal model of development. My working hypothesis is that this body of creative work presents neoliberal capitalism as restricting the poor’s access to ecological resources while, paradoxically, mobilizing the labor/energy of the poor against those very resources they were denied with a view to achieving Western style development. This results in a more acute class distinction and environmental catastrophe leaving the poor more vulnerable to environmental crises. To negotiate the environmental crises caused by neoliberalism, the South Asian writers I discuss call for relational and cross-temporal engagements initiated and spearheaded by the locals.  Western neoliberal policies implemented through international financial organizations and backed up by military interventions have caused serious ecological disasters, especially in the global South. The uneven material development and ecological crises in the South point to a larger crisis that lies at the heart of Western model of development. Critics have challenged and offered alternatives to Western ideologies of development, which manifest in the emergence of post-development and sustainable development discourses in the late twentieth century. Although these discourses counter neoliberal-development achieved at the cost of environmental destruction, they pay little attention to relationality—both human and temporal—that can play an important role in forging strategies to challenge the onslaught of neoliberalism on life and the environment. My research responds to this gap in the discussion of development, counter development, and ecological crises in the global South.  My project is situated at the intersection of literary studies, history, and development studies. While revisiting the past offers insight into the present environmental experiences of the South Asians as represented in literature, scholarship on development in conjunction with history enables me to examine the socio-economic experiences of these people.  My literary analysis is informed by the critical perspectives of Marxism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism.  The incorporation of these three intellectual traditions allows me to forge a critical framework that can analyze ecological crises arising from the unbridled consumption and accumulation by the capitalist in the age of neoliberal globalization. By examining the ways South Asian literature intervenes in the discussion of development and environmental crises, my project offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the present crisis.