Unmournable Bodies: Gothic Postcolonialism and The Spectre of Loss in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Anuradha Roy's Sleeping on Jupiter

• Main Author: Kannan, Sitara
• Format: Others
• Published: Digital Commons @ Butler University 2019
• Subjects: melancholoa; postcolonialism; gothic; trauma theory; deterritorialization; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/grtheses/515; https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1514&context=grtheses

"My thesis compares Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter in order to demonstrate how a) each text is a product of its moment and a reflection of corresponding critical thought and b) how an inversion of gothic tropes in Sleeping reflects a changed world dynamic, a melancholic exploration of epistemological and traumatic loss that can be seen not only as a recognition of the continued power of oppressive systems but a reflection on the failure of cosmopolitanism to “rescue” the global subject from her own isolation and recolonization. I claim that this is not only demonstrated by a change in form and how gothic tropes are presented, but in how homosexuality and deviant sexuality in particular is treated, a reminder that even in texts that attempt to condemn and reject colonizing tendencies, the political moment and its theoretical appendages continue to haunt postcolonial discourse, enabling recolonization and restratifying spaces of resistance. I claim that this recognition need not be totalizing or nihilistic, but that in the recognition itself lies the possibility for resistance, an act of rebellion that must be constantly re-enacted in order to deterritorialize what has been captured and displaced, a fluid and imaginative negotiation that, much like literature, is limitless in interpretation and offers readers constant and multiplicitous possibilities for agency in the face of equally fluid oppressive systems."--Provided by the author.