Technology and colonial power in South Asian postcolonial literature and science fiction.

摘要

This project will be an exhaustive inquiry into the effect of systemic technology-based imperialistic oppression on South Asian individuals, and how those effects manifest in South Asian postcolonial literature and postcolonial science fiction texts stretching from a pre-colonial text first published in 1666 to the present. Through careful research, I will work to utilize the history outlined in the beginning of the project as a lens through which to view India's complicated history regarding technology, whether it be industrial, agrarian or medicinal, as represented in literature. It would establish the ways in which these technologies both oppressed and liberated the Indian people. India suffered a great deal after the end of colonial rule with the question of what to do with the legacy left by the British. Looking at the adaptations of British technologies is an interesting place to focus an examination.;By examining what happens when an oppressed individual is confronted with the reality of forced or voluntary adoption of various types of technology (such as industrial technology, agrarian or ecological technology, medicine and biotechnology), as well as how their colonized or formerly colonized status affects their relationship with the new technology, I hope to show that there is a visible literary nexus point between the postcolonial Indian novel and the enactment of colonial technology within the subcontinent. This dissertation will uncover how various types of technology function as instruments of colonialism, in conjunction with the perceived psychic affects of imperialism. The dissertation will also look closely at how the function of the listed technologies changed, as they became a paradoxical postcolonial tool of liberation from the original modes of oppression after Independence.;It is my hope that the end result of this examination will be a complex and comprehensive look at the literary portrayals and history of multiple types of technology in the subcontinent, the ways in which India's relationship with these various kinds of technology is expressed in postcolonial literature, and what postcolonial science fiction of India says about where the culture is going, as well as where it has been.