Neoliberal Disgust in Aravind Adiga's: The White Tiger

How does scatology function in postcolonial fiction today? And what might that idiom tell us about neoliberalism as a cynical political rationality sweeping the developing world? Aravind Adiga's exemplary 2008 satire on globalizing India, The White Tiger, parodies how neoliberalism normalizes misanthropic self-interest as the truth of society and human nature today. Michel Foucault identified this self-interest as a newly emergent form of rational choice, one that shapes human beings into "entrepreneurs of themselves." These subjects are governed by the brutally instrumentalist terms of investment, risk, and cost-benefit. The novel parodies this subject position through the language of neo-liberal disgust, a form of scatological rhetoric that inverts the traditionally oppositional function of scatology by rendering the victims of underdevelopment the authors of their own oppression.