Neoliberalism and Allegory

In "Third-World Literature," the essay that sparked the memorable Social Text debate over national allegory several decades ago, Fredric Jameson suggests that all third world texts be read as allegor i cal because of that world's specific entry into capitalism without western cultural markers such as the private-public divide (1986, 69). With out that divide, Jameson asserts, all characters appear as stand-ins for collective, social phenomena. To this Aijaz Ahmad, in his response essay, counters by asking whether some of the cultural markers of capitalism shouldn't also manifest in the third world if the entire world is now securely in its grasp (13)? In a mediating essay that followed this initial exchange, Madhava Prasad sifts through the hasty generalizations on both sides and attempts to preserve the analytic usefulness of allegory as a deconstructive tool and form of cultural critique for writers and critical theorists who want to investigate the "production and reproduction of subjectivities" (57). In the spirit of that mediation, my essay attempts to reconceive the literary-historical legacy and afterlife of allegory in a way that not only questions its common displacement nowadays—from the developed North to the underdeveloped South (as a properly "third world" literary form)—but also situates some startling new versions that seem to have superseded allegory's role in imagining the nation-state. Through a reading of Aravind Adiga's recent novel White Tiger, I examine the refashioning of allegory from a national to a neoliberal frame and ask what that might tell us about new possibilities for representing a global political economy within contemporary fiction today.

Returning to Prasad for a moment: his most useful move in the discussion of the Jameson-Ahmad debate is to move allegory from Jameson's Orientalist credo that all third world texts are necessarily allegorical to a critical reading where the allegorical is restored as a theoretical project of bringing to the surface "the naturalized, concealed frames of intelligibility that enable cultural enunciation" and also produce "new conceptual frames which, by providing new perspectives on the problem, enable (re)thinking in the service of social transformation" (Prasad, 57-58). Thus, rather than arguing for allegory as culturally inescapable or as historically given in various postcolonial texts (a direction in which Jameson's discussion ultimately leads), Prasad points instead to a condition of possibility for the nation as a naturalized frame of reference that remains "a constant presence" (rather than a monolithic referent) in contemporary cultural debates (78):

The appearance of a fortuitous development gap that serves to conceal the necessity of the uneven and combined development of regions of the globe for capitalism is part of the nation-state's ideology. Moreover, in so far as a global order, with its implicit value allocations, is a constant and active element of postcolonial subjectivity, internal comparison/ competition is always accompanied by comparison/competition at the international level.

(79)

Prasad allows us to see why, in the neoliberal assertions about a modern and globalizing India today, for instance, this comparison/competition at the international level is still staged through the idea of a nation that is under the scrutiny of the world. A case in point would be the highly acclaimed advertising campaign by the national newspaper Times of India,which, on the first page of its January 1, 2007, issue featured a rousing full-page anthem titled "India Poised," which began with these lines: "There are two Indias in this country. One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives that the world has been recently showering upon us. The other India is the leash" ("India Poised").

The anthem is an example of what I call neoliberal allegory, where a dynamic new India with high rates of economic growth seemingly repairs the split geography of uneven development, class divisions, and political interests by unleashing the forces of entrepreneurship and competition. In this scenario, despite the suggestion of a historical break, neoliberal allegory still figures the nation as a struggling individual emerging finally from long-term postcolonial economic woes and ready to take its...