The haunted subject: Modernist and postcolonial narratives of the self.

Abstract

This dissertation is an attempt to rethink the relation between narrative and the historical category of an autonomous and coherent subject constructed around notions of race, culture, ethnicity, and nationality. The goal is to posit an alternative metaphor for the subject through the figure of the ghost and to explore how this figure has come to determine the form of modernist and postcolonial narrative through literary constructions of what I call haunted subjectivities. I begin with a revaluation of the theoretical terrain of identity---an intervention motivated by the failure of some critical models to account for those subjects who overflow the boundaries of linear subjectivity. Interrogating the subjects of power and their others in moments of major historical tumult---revolution, partition, postcolonial independence, civil war, World War, Holocaust, and the period of African-American slavery---the texts I study embrace and narrate identity in crisis. Representing these times of extreme stress, James Joyce, Derek Walcott, Anita Desai, Stephen Wright and Charles Johnson deploy alienated, exiled and enslaved individuals to reestablish the historical contingency of individual circumstances while exploring the exigencies of trauma for those who inhabit the thresholds of their worlds. Their marginal characters speak the particularity of their in-between status: they survive by navigating the intersecting currents of culture, power and faith. In each of the texts I investigate, individuals come to be defined by their very liminality---eschewing socially mandated distinctions in favor of hybrid and multiple identities. I argue that these characters are haunted by the perpetual awareness of unspoken contexts that influence their perceptions. The study of these haunted subjects brings to light crucial issues of modernism and postcolonialism, including the role of alienation in the conception of the self and the relationship between political compulsions and aesthetic ideology. By tracking the ghosts that haunt these subjects, I try to relocate modernity and the postcolonial from the claims associated with theories of identity to a more dynamic and protean arena---one defined by analogy and difference. The project responds directly to the work of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Homi Bhabha, Frederic Jameson and Michel de Certeau.