In search of the comprador: self-exoticisation in selected texts from the South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas

Shabangu, Mohammad

Title: In search of the comprador: self-exoticisation in selected texts from the South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas
Creator: Shabangu, Mohammad
ThesisAdvisor: Naidu, Samantha
Subject: Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's children -- Criticism and interpretation
Subject: Kureishi, Hanif. Buddha of suburbia -- Criticism and interpretation
Subject: Hosseini, Khaled. Kite runner -- Criticism and interpretation
Subject: Hosseini, Khaled. Thousand splendid suns -- Criticism and interpretation
Subject: Compradors
Subject: Exoticism in literature
Subject: Literature and transnationalism -- Middle East
Subject: Literature and transnationalism -- South Asia
Subject: Middle Eastern literature (English) -- History and criticism
Subject: South Asian literature (English) -- History and criticism
Date: 2015
Type: Thesis
Type: Masters
Type: MSocSc
Identifier: vital:2328
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1017770
Description: This thesis is concerned with transnational literature and writers of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diasporas. It argues that the diasporic position of the authors enables their roles as comprador subjects. The thesis maintains that the figure of the comprador is always acted upon by its ontological predisposition, so that diasporic positionality often involves a single subject which straddles and speaks from two or more different subject positions. Comprador authors can be said to be co-opted by Western metropolitan publishing companies who stand to benefit by marketing the apparent marginality of the homelands about which these authors write. The thesis therefore proceeds from the notion that such a diasporic position is the paradoxical condition of the transnational subject or writer. I submit that there is, to some degree, a questionable element in the common political and cultural suggestions that emerge upon closer evaluation of diasporic literature. Indeed, a charge of complicity has been levelled against authors who write, apparently, to service two distinct entities – the wish to speak on behalf of a minority collective, as well as the imperial ‘centre’ which is the intended interlocutor of the comprador author. However, it is this difference, the implied otherness or marginality of the outsider within, which I argue is sometimes used by diasporic writers as a way of articulating with ‘authenticity’ the cultures and politics of their erstwhile localities. This thesis is concerned, therefore, with the representation of ‘the East’ in four novels by diasporic, specifically comprador writers, namely Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I suggest that the ‘third-world’ and transnational literature can also be a selling point for the transnational subject, whose representations may at times pander to preconceived ideas about ‘the Orient’ and its people. As an illustration of this double-bind, I offer a close reading of all the novels to suggest that on the one hand, the comprador author writes within the paradigm of the ‘writing back’ movement, as a counter-discourse to the Orientalist representations of the homeland. However, the corollary is that such an attempt to ‘write back’, in a sense, re-inscribes the very discourse it wishes to subvert, especially because the literature is aimed at a ‘Western’ audience. Moreover, the template of the comprador could be used to explain how a transnational post-9/11 text from an Afghan-American, for instance, may be put to the service of the imperial machine, and read, therefore, as a supporting document to the U.S. policy on Afghanistan.
Format: 178 leaves, pdf
Publisher: Rhodes University, Faculty of Humanities, English
Language: English
Rights: Shabangu, Mohammad

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