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How does scatology function in postcolonial fiction today? And what might that idiom tell us about neoliberalism as a cynical political rationality sweeping the developing world? Aravind Adiga's exemplary 2008 satire on globalizing India, The White Tiger, parodies how neoliberalism normalizes misanthropic self-interest as the truth of society and human nature today. Michel Foucault identified this self-interest as a newly emergent form of rational choice, one that shapes human beings into "entrepreneurs of themselves." These subjects are governed by the brutally instrumentalist terms of investment, risk, and cost-benefit. The novel parodies this subject position through the language of neoliberal disgust, a form of scatological rhetoric that inverts the traditionally oppositional function of scatology by rendering the victims of underdevelopment the authors of their own oppression.
Keywords: postcolonial fiction / satire / neoliberalism / scatology / Global South novel
What is the place of waste in postcolonial fiction today? Scholars invested in the question offer a range of answers exemplified in Jed Esty's claim that refuse in the postcolonial novel often highlights "the failures of colonial development, the corruptions of neocolonial politics, [and] the residual quality of postcolonial nationalism" (55). Here Esty refers to the excremental imagery of African fiction following post-1945 decolonization.1 Many African intellectuals writing in the 1960s witnessed the rise of obscene kleptocracies, the comprador elite's grotesque self-interest, and the abject poverty following decolonization, catalyzing their obscene, pessimistic, and self-loathing portraits of post-independence society. Often chided for bartering in colonial-era epithets, these authors used scatological satire to protest the bleak shortcomings of the anticolonial revolutions.
In what follows, I explore the excremental idiom in "dark" Anglophone Indian fiction today and ask what that idiom might tell us about neoliberalism as a cynical political rationality sweeping the developing world.2 I do so by arguing that Aravind Adiga's exemplary 2008 satire on globalizing India, The White Tiger, uses scatology to critique the homo oeconomicus of neoliberalism. The term describes the theoretical figure of political economy. A primary example here is Adam Smith's eighteenth-century economic man: a subject who pursues self-interest through "a propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another" (14). Neoliberalism's homo oeconomicus, by contrast, is what Michel Foucault calls an "entrepreneur" and "creature of competition" in a time when market...