Revealing Fictions: Neo-liberalism, Domestic Servants, and Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us

This article focuses on diasporic Indian writer Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us (2005) and situates the work in the literary context of the postcolonial Anglophone novel and social realism, as well as the social context of India's liberalized economy and growing class divides. I argue that the novel represents a growing body of contemporary Anglophone writing from the Global South focusing on the figure of the domestic servant in order to problematize the cultural and economic structures that subjugate her. In concentrating on this marginalized and dispossessed individual, texts like The Space Between Us reveal the fictional nature of the discourses of capitalist "development" on which neo-liberal globalization is based. The novel illuminates the oppression of the domestic worker by highlighting how these modern discourses enable the sale of her entire body to her employer so that it can be directed to sit, stand, and embody subjugation and difference in culturally specific ways. I contend that the novel recuperates an alternative ethics of being by conceptualizing the body as a vehicle between, rather than a mode of segregating, "self" and "other." In the process, the text teaches the middle-class Indian reader to see herself as an agent of exploitation and the servant as someone similar to herself. Umrigar's novel also serves a wider global Anglophone readership in its attempt to destabilize capitalist modes of evaluating laborers and labor, thereby inciting ethical action in specific postcolonial contexts.