Conclusion: The Precarious Life of the Other

Abstract

The four South Asian diasporic fictions that I have discussed in the previous chapters represent ‘post’-9/11 narratives. By reading fictional narrative as a cultural form, I look at the novel as an aesthetic form of description, communication, and representation, as well as ‘a sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another’, to quote Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (xiii). If the novel provides a platform for the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the novel of the diaspora as an example of world literature further responds to Judith Butler’s ethical call to the humanities to attend to ‘the precariousness of the Other’ so as ‘to understand the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and dissent, and to create a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform’ (134, 151). The ‘post’-9/11 diasporic fictions by Rushdie, Kunzru, Ali, and Hamid all acknowledge the existence of other peoples, cultures, and societies, and create alternatives to Western narcissism and American imperialism that have appeared to dominate post-9/11 mainstream political, media, and literary discourses.

The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them. (Said, Culture and Imperialism xiii)

The title is indebted to Butler, Precarious Life.