NAVIGATING THE UNIVERSAL: THE POLITICS OF NARRATING DISPLACEMENT IN 20TH-21ST CENTURY BRITISH AND ANGLOPHONE NOVELS

Abstract

This dissertation revives the long debated philosophical question of universalism, analyzing its significance to displacement narratives in select Anglophone novels published in the 20th and 21st centuries. Scholars like Edward Said and Frantz Fanon have argued about the impact of universalism on racial and cultural differences in postcolonial contexts. This dissertation extends this debate while uncovering the power discourses of universalism through the study of three novels by renowned literary figures whose literary productions center around displacement: Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives. With explication of each novel, it contends that their form and content strongly reflect their engagement with the question of universalism. The dissertation structure navigates backwards in time, beginning with Exit West’s universalized narrative of the 21st century refugee crisis and moving, with each novel, to narratives set roughly 50-60 years prior to the previous one. Chapter one deciphers the neocolonial discourses embedded within universal narratives of the refugee crisis. It argues that, in Exit West, such neocolonial discourses attempt to “humanize” the refugees but end up reinforcing not only the “othering” of the Muslim World - as places governed by despots, inhabited by religious fanatics, violent, intolerant, passive, misogynistic, and lustful individuals - but also support the evasion of Western responsibility that has caused massive suffering and displacement in the Middle East and elsewhere. Universalizing the refugee experience serves Western power, in other words. The second chapter turns to The Lonely Londoners’ depiction of the Caribbean migration surge to London after the British Nationality Act of 1948, the period of the Windrush Generation. This chapter uncovers the power discourses that can manifest in the critique of universalism. It argues the novel’s subjective mode, and its construction of a worldview centered on its male migrant central cast, provides a powerful critique of universal narratives at the core of racial hierarchy. But it also argues that the novel’s critique is bounded by its implicit patriarchal assumptions. Therefore, I direct attention to the way in which the novel’s limited gender politics emerge from its attempt to not only critically represent racism in postwar Britain, but to do so in a way that challenges universalizing logic at work in both racist and some antiracist discourses. The third chapter deals with Afterlives’ subversive narrative of imperial displacement during the 19th and 20th German colonial rule of East Africa. This chapter analyzes Afterlives’ approach as an alternative to Exit West’s universalism and The Lonely Londoners’ anti-universalism. I argue that the novel circumvents power discourses of universalism by decentralizing the German authoritative historiography and interrogating the hierarchies in the local community and in the Schutztruppe. In other words, it offers a model of how to resolve some of the problems of both universalisms, as seen in Exit West, and possible forms of its critique, as seen in The Lonely Londoners. In conclusion, I reflect on the novel as a genre, connecting this dissertation to literary historical questions about the relationship between novels and imperialism.