'---All that is present and moving...': Thinking working-class writing at the limits (Mulk Raj Anand, Mahasweta Devi, India, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Sri Lanka, Bessie Head, South Africa, Tillie Olsen).

摘要

A persistent question for theoreticians of working-class literature had to do with the problem that its major narratives were tied to the logic of revolutions. The development of “proletarian” literature beyond short term political agitation, codings of crisis, and “revolutionary romanticism” has remained an issue within the literary history of different moments in working-class writing. Attending to an underresearched archive of feminist, anti-colonial, and counter-globalist texts, my dissertation theorizes an alternative genealogy for the literature of labor. I take as my departure point a formation of working-class literature which is not identified with the brief revolutionary conjuncture, but with the lasting ethical transformation that must take place after “the” revolution, after national independence—after the communists come to power. As Perry Anderson has suggested in In the Tracks of Historical Materialism and as Etienne Balibar has ventured in In Search of the Proletariat, Marx was unable to produce a sustained theory of the revolutionary subject. My dissertation works at the same problem, turning away from the moment of industrial capitalism in Britain toward a changing “formation”—not genre—of writings from South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as North America. Building upon work in Marxist-feminism and postcolonial theory, I ask what ethical narratives define working-class collectivity and subaltern acts of resistance outside the limits of trade-unionist socialism and left party politics; What topoi represent working-class resistance in this age of economic globalization? Specific texts studied include works by Mulk Raj Anand (1905– ), Tillie Olsen (1912 or 1913– ), Ambalavener Sivanandan (1923– ), Mahasweta Devi (1926– ), Bessie Head (1937–1986) as well as the working-class periodicals of the Da Bindu collective (1984– ) (Sri Lankan free trade zone garment factory workers).; My methodology necessarily draws upon the resources of comparative literature. As we know Marx's texts on classes remain unfinished; the uncompleted manuscripts of the “Trinity Formula” chapter as well as the fragment headed “Classes,” compiled by Engels after Marx's death into the final section of the third volume of Capital compose the beginnings of a line of questioning that could not be developed further. His later, uncompleted argument in Capital volume 3, however, begins to suggest a critique of historicism and the place of importance given over in his earlier writings to the historical example of industrial Britain. My dissertation is also an attempt to theorize these unfinished texts—to extend the reach of his questioning “what makes a class?” beyond the provenance of nineteenth century industrial capitalism. Thus the logic of my organizational scheme of bringing together disparate examples of writing is not simply additive, but supplementary—that is, both supplying a gap and adding an excess. It does not suggest a model of uncritical cultural relativism. But rather, the assumption undergirding this patterning of texts is the premise that the idea of class cannot be understood in a static frame of reference privileging the exceptionalism of this or that working class in history.