Neoliberalism and the Novel

Emily Johansen, Alissa Karl, Emily Johansen, Alissa Karl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134844920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The novel form has long been connected to modern capitalism and is, arguably, the literary genre most prominently enmeshed in contemporary global markets. Yet, as many critics have suggested about capital, something has changed in the last forty years. With the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant global economic rationality and mode of governance, the experience of capital has produced new ways of seeing and relating to the world, leading, as David Harvey observes, to "the financialization of everything". The novel, indexed to capital in myriad ways, then, must similarly have been transformed.

Neoliberalism and the Novel investigates both those changes wrought to the novel form by changing arrangements of capital, and the novel's broader engagement with neoliberalism itself. The chapters in this book consider these questions from a variety of angles, attending to the way in which the neoliberal novel deploys familiar generic patterns as a site from which to offer critique; examining the changing operation of labour and time under neoliberalism and its effect on novel form; and offering a broader call for new reading and interpretative practices to respond to changing socio-economic realities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

Emily S. Davis

The betrayals of neoliberalism in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy

In this essay I suggest that analysis of the consequences of neoliberalism is central to the representation of Arjie and his family in Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel Funny Boy. Not only does an examination of this relatively undiscussed phenomenon reframe our view of the novel’s thematic concerns, it also points to some important ways in which the novel intervenes in discussions in the social sciences about the relationship between neoliberal economic policies and the Sri Lankan civil war. Whereas neoliberal economists have tended to view conflicts around ethnic nationalism, homophobia, and other social forces as unfortunate, incidental factors that thwart economic progress, Selvadurai’s novel exposes the complex ways in which economic policy both produces and perpetuates generations of ingrained understandings of individual and group identity.

Early in Sri Lankan Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel Funny Boy, the young protagonist, Arjie, delightedly describes his family’s weekend shopping trips to Cornell’s Supermarket:

Cornell’s had opened up recently and was the first American-style supermarket in Sri Lanka. It was a wonderful place, for there on the shelves were items like blueberry jam, kippers, and canned apricots – things I had read about when I was younger in Famous Five and Nancy Drew books but had never actually tasted. From listening to my father’s conversations, I understood that this sudden availability of imported goods had to do with the new government and something called ‘free economy’ and ‘the end of socialism’. (pp. 98–9)¹

This celebratory description of the influx of Western goods into Sri Lanka as a result of its adoption of neoliberal economic policies is followed almost immediately by Arjie’s father’s revelation that he and a business partner are in the process of building a hotel for tourists called the Paradise Beach Resort (p. 99). Arjie describes his ‘astonishment’ at this evidence of the family’s increasing affluence, which culminates in his father’s trip to Europe to promote the new hotel (p. 100).

From this euphoric moment, however, the novel charts the relentless unravelling of the family’s economic and social status and eventual flight from Sri Lanka as refugees. Arjie’s father, who has attempted to insulate his Tamil family from ethnic violence by embracing what he sees as a universally welcoming discourse of neoliberalism, instead finds his business partners abandon him and his hotel vandalised by Sinhalese youth protesting the gay sex tourism it has implicitly sanctioned. In Selvadurai’s novel, we thus see the convergence of a number of threads that emphasise the link between neoliberalism and modalities of ethnic identity, gender, sexuality, and class: the state’s cynical deployment of ethnic nationalist propaganda alongside neoliberal economic rhetoric to turn citizens against one another, the tension around Arjie’s father’s toleration of homosexuality when it profits his hotel business but not when it is represented by his own son, and Arjie’s own use of an array of foreign objects through and against which he narrativizes his emerging sense of self. While Funny Boy has often been read as a narrative about gay coming of age or the trauma of ethnic violence, then, neoliberalism proves to be a central but undertheorized entry point to an exploration of how these narratives about identity evolve over the course of the novel.

Most of the interviews with Selvadurai following the publication of Funny Boy, as well as the academic scholarship on the novel, have concentrated on one or more of the intersecting currents of oppression experienced by the novel’s young protagonist, Arjie, as a queer Tamil subject in the increasingly tense political climate leading to the official outbreak of civil war in Sri Lanka in 1983. One finds extended discussions of how Arjie resists and reinforces constructions of ethnic, national, and sexual identity,² as well as of the novel’s theorisation of exile.³ Questions of genre have also garnered a fair amount of attention, especially explorations of the novel’s use of the Western genre of the bildungsroman.⁴ The novel’s deft analysis of how neoliberalism as economic mandate and political philosophy contributes to the escalating conflict represented in the book has received surprisingly little attention.

In an interview with the Lambda Book Report in 1996, Selvadurai himself calls attention to how this neoliberal context shapes his young protagonist’s world, even as Arjie is unable to fully comprehend that context:

I felt I couldn’t get into the novel, when told through the child’s perspective, the sophisticated explanation of what is going on, how the “liberalization” of the economy played into communal tension, how everything was being taken from the poor, with the government’s consequent need for scapegoating minorities. Until recently, there was a very different situation: an 80 percent literacy rate; excellent, free medical care. Now, all that is disintegrating, the value of the rupee has fallen dramatically. But it wasn’t possible to bring that in through Arjie’s consciousness.⁵

When the interviewer suggests that this ‘economic background… was there… in Arjie’s father’s business dealings’, Selvadurai laments that the novel lacks ‘the analysis,… but with all the father’s talk about “a free economy” and making Sri Lanka “the next Singapore”, I think that the analysis is there for all who know what went on’.⁶ In the essay that follows, I suggest that while the novel may not grapple with neoliberalism as overtly as Selvadurai might have hoped, analysis of the consequences of neoliberalism is in fact central to its representation of Arjie and his family. Not only does an examination of this relatively undiscussed phenomenon reframe our view of the novel’s thematic concerns, it also points to some important ways in which the novel intervenes in discussions in the social sciences about the relationship between neoliberal economic policies and the Sri Lankan civil war. Whereas neoliberal economists have tended to view conflicts around ethnic nationalism, homophobia, and other social forces as unfortunate, incidental factors that thwart economic progress, Selvadurai’s novel exposes the complex ways in which economic policy both produces and perpetuates generations of ingrained understandings of individual and group identity.

But what exactly is neoliberalism? For a term that has become an academic buzzword over the last two decades, according to Boas and Gans-Morse, it remains somewhat loosely and variously defined.⁷ What started as a more modest rethinking of liberal ideas by economists and legal scholars of the Freiburg School in Germany in the interwar years had transformed by the 1970s into the radical economic decentralisation of the Pinochet regime in Chile, among other cases. According to Elizabeth Povinelli, neoliberalism has typically involved ‘the privatization and deregulation of state assets, the territorial dispersion of production through subcontracting, and a shift in tax policies that favored the rich’.⁸ Such policies were widely denounced by the Left in the 1990s as the ‘Washington Consensus’, the US-mandated approach to economic development forced on countries in the Global South as a condition for IMF and World Bank loans.⁹ As Povinelli suggests, though, neoliberalism is not simply an economic policy; it is a historical time period, a prescription for the attitude of the state towards workers within and beyond its own borders, and most broadly, ‘a series of struggles across an uneven social terrain’.¹⁰

Povinelli’s definition for me begs two obvious questions. First, is neoliberalism simply neocolonialism by another name? Does contemporary scholarship on neoliberalism substitute a universalised notion of class inequity for what is in reality a messier concoction that includes race and colonial and national histories? To put a finer point on it, what is the value of neoliberalism as a critical apparatus through which to approach texts from the Global South? These are questions that deserve more attention than I can give them here – and that I undoubtedly need to work out more fully – but that I want to address briefly in the hopes of spurring further discussion. My provisional argument about the relationship between these two terms, to echo Nkrumah, is that neoliberalism is the latest, if not the last, stage of neocolonialism.¹¹ The fact that wealthy current and former colonial powers dictate economic and social policy directly through aid and foreign investment or indirectly through organisations such as the IMF and World Bank is nothing new. Neoliberalism simply provides a useful marker of the particular ideologies of economic and social relations currently dominant within this neocolonial framework. My modest proposal is that approaching neoliberalism in this way not only works against a static formulation of the neocolonial as everything that came after colonialism, but also situates neoliberalism as a historical phenomenon that is articulated through specific neocolonial contexts rather than as an abstract universal.

What, then, is particular to neoliberalism as historical moment and ideological program? What kinds of struggles, to return to Povinelli, has neoliberalism precipitated or even exacerbated? One key element is neoliberalism’s claim about the intrinsically positive relationship between deregulated capitalism and human well-being. David Harvey argues that

neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade.¹²

Capitalism is an old friend of neocolonialism, to be sure, but the shift in focus from demanding the Western-style welfare state to demanding the effective dismantling of that state (with the perpetual exception of the military) adds a new element to the equation.

Prominent economists responsible for disseminating neoliberalism as a gospel of development have demonstrated an extraordinary faith in the idea that neoliberalism is the only viable means by which to advance the well-being of citizens, and especially to sustain or even produce democracy. Thus, when Pinochet’s large-scale neoliberal economic reforms were accompanied by ‘brutal methods of political repression’, economists such as ‘[Milton] Friedman and [Friedrich von] Hayek nonetheless argued that such neoliberal shock treatments ought to be given a “fair chance”, predicting that their swift application would return Chile to democracy, freedom, and unprecedented levels of prosperity’.¹³ By the early 1980s, neoliberalism had become the default answer to all questions of development. As Harvey explains, ‘in return for debt rescheduling, indebted countries were required to implement institutional reforms, such as cuts in welfare expenditures, more flexible labour market laws, and privatisation. Thus was “structural adjustment” invented’.¹⁴ Such structural adjustment programmes continue to be viewed as the recipe for successful development, despite mounting evidence about their ultimate limitations.¹⁵ These were certainly the expectations imposed upon the Sri Lankan government when it accepted IMF loans in the 1970s.

It was during the same decade that Foucault began his lectures on bio-politics in which he questioned the ways in which neoliberalism as economic policy connoted a fundamental change in our understanding of governmentality. In Povinelli’s words, Foucault worried that ‘[n]eoliberals did not merely wish to free the truth games of capitalism from the market itself – the market should be the general measure of all social activities and values’. Under this new market-bound logic, Povinelli argues, ‘any form of life that is not organised on the basis of market values is characterised as a potential security risk’.¹⁶ What Harvey, Foucault, and Povinelli point out is that the supposed emancipatory politics of neoliberalism masks a profoundly transformed sense of the value of human life, as well as of the purpose and shape of politics. The case of the civil war in Sri Lanka presents an illuminating example of this transformation from an earlier neo-colonial phase to a neoliberal one. It was not simply an unfortunate but unrelated historical coincidence that the opening of the economy in 1977 with then-president J. R. Jayawardene’s acceptance of IMF loans paralleled the surge in violence that ultimately escalated into full-blown civil war, as neoliberal economists such as Athukorala and Rajapatirana would have it.¹⁷ Instead, many scholars have come to support the claim that Selvadurai makes in the interview above: neoliberal policies directly exacerbated ethnic tensions and led to the outbreak of the civil war by disrupting the precarious apportioning of the economic pie that had allowed different constituencies within the country to uneasily coexist in an earlier neocolonial phase.¹⁸

To flesh out this connection between neoliberalism and violence further, some brief background on Sri Lanka is in order. The former British colony of Ceylon, Sri Lanka had already seen sporadic bursts of violence by the time of the notorious Black July riots of 1983. The parties in these conflicts have mainly been portrayed along ethnic lines, as the majority (primarily Buddhist) Sinhala community, comprising about 75 per cent of the population, and the minority (primarily Hindu) Tamil population, approximately 18 per cent of the population. However, as Winslow and Woost caution, the ways in which these communities identify themselves and others have shifted significantly over time, ‘with religion, language, and caste frequently given more importance than ethnicity’.¹⁹ Muslims comprise 8 per cent of the population, and Burghers (multiracial descendants of European men and Sri Lankan women) make up less than 1 per cent of the population. All of these communities are somewhat fragmented by internal divisions, such as those between Low-country Sinhalese, who came into earlier contact with the colonizers, and Kandyan Sinhalese, who live primarily in the interior of the country. Similarly, there is an important cultural gap between Tamils who have lived in Sri Lanka for centuries and Indian Tamils brought over by the British as agricultural workers during the colonial period. Moreover, both the Sinhala and Tamil constituencies include Christian minorities.²⁰

Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1947. In its early years, the country was ruled by the United Nationalist Party (UNP), a multi-ethnic umbrella party. The UNP offered no significant changes from British rule in that the English-educated, Westernized elite groups that had occupied the most important posts under the British remained in power. The fact that Burghers and Tamils had been favoured by the British before independence and continued to hold a large number of these positions fed resentment among the Sinhalese majority. The election of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party in 1956 decisively changed...