A new kind of dignity: Novels of self-empowerment in the neoliberal age

In this dissertation I analyze the ideological effects of the neoliberal discourse of "self-empowerment" in selected novels. I define neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideological and political undertaking to transform society and the self according to laissez-faire market principles. While often associated with neoconservative efforts to reintroduce free market solutions to the world in the 1980s, neoliberalism is now a dominant political rationality and commonsense. It is the ideological basis upon which mainstream politics, as well as socio-economic reforms, are animated. Within this ascendency of neoliberal thought, discourses of freedom have increasingly focused on empowerment as the main political objective. This turn towards empowerment, facilitated by the "happiness industry" and the rise in psychotherapeutic counseling, has permeated the literary realm. In my reading of four novels -- The Remains of the Day, A Gesture Life, Funny Boy and The Buddha of Suburbia -- all published in the 1980s and 1990s, I demonstrate how narratives of sexual liberation employ the idiom of psychotherapeutics to articulate a politics of liberation. I argue that these novels reproduce hegemonic perspectives of self and society.;In my first chapter, I analyze Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. I show how the novel's political engagement with the issue of aristocratic subjugation is a thinly disguised psychotherapeutic exercise, of which the objective is to diagnose emotional self-restraint as a particular kind of political neurosis. This theme of emotional lack reappears in the second chapter where I analyze Chang-rae Lee's novel, A Gesture Life. A narrative about historical trauma, this novel addresses the psychological costs of living one's life according to societal expectations. Like Remains, this novel is a psychotherapeutic commentary about political alienation. The principal lesson in both these novels is that one must get in touch with one's true self in order to be liberated from the pressures of repressive ideologies.;The third chapter is a reading of Shyam Selvadurai's novel, Funny Boy. As a gay coming-of-age narrative that takes place in war-torn Sri Lanka, the novel highlights the importance of sexual liberation to the project of national reconciliation. The novel further seems to suggest that sexual liberation and self-empowerment are key to Sri Lanka's national empowerment. A similar message of empowerment resonates in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, a novel I discuss in the last chapter of this dissertation. Against the backdrop of Thatcherite England which oversaw the breakdown of the post-war consensus of the welfare state, the novel, I argue, promotes the idea that self-discovery and self-fulfillment are synonymous with freedom. Despite their differences -- post-war or Thatcherite Britain, contemporary US, and Sri Lanka; middle-aged Asian American or white British male or young Asian-British or Asian -- all four novels equate freedom to self-liberation. Freedom, in the novels, is now a hegemonic injunction to empower ourselves, to stimulate the powers of the self.