Home Schooling: Heuristics of Education in Postcolonial Fiction Restricted; Files Only
Betik, Bailey (Spring 2023)
Abstract
In his work Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie asserts, “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world” (109). My dissertation takes Rushdie’s quote and its emphasis on plurality literally, addressing the question of how postcolonial fiction equips readers to understand their consumption of the world through the scope of education. Too often, literary criticism on postcolonial education focuses on what happens in and around a school or classroom, ignoring the knowledge production occurring in other spaces. Extending considerations of “education,” I examine often overlooked home spaces to identify the lessons, metaphors, & opportunities they offer for characters to learn about their identities and positionalities in the world. I specifically examine the methods of resistance and metaphors for complication in Anglophone postcolonial novels from across the twentieth century: Nervous Conditions, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The God of Small Things, and White Teeth. I argue that turning our attention to these educational metaphors in the home space offers a more holistic insight into how and where people learn about their relationship to colonial institutions, as well as helps us identify decolonial or disruptive possibilities. Concluding, I make a case for exploring fictional representations of the home in conjunction with-- and in precedence to— representations of school to better swallow the world.
Table of Contents
Home Schooling: An Introduction 1
1. Swallowing the World: A Theoretical Framework 4
2. Provincializing the School 9
3. Home Schooling: Four Examples in Postcolonial Fiction 13
Loophole Spaces: Feminine Education, the Home, and Resistance in Nervous Conditions 19
1. A Case Against Bildungsromane 23
2. Home Schooling: Women’s Spaces on the Homestead 34
3. Hostipitality: Loopholes without Space 45
The Case for Chutnification: Genealogies of Education in The Moor’s Last Sigh 55
1. Metaphorical Moorings: Palimpsest, Chutney, and Education 59
2. It Runs In The Family: Home School Genealogies 68
3. “British Is Still Best, Madder-Moyselle”: Epifania’s Unintentional Chutnification 75
4. “Chokefied”: Aurora’s Palimpsest As a Failed Model of History 82
5. Swallowing The World: Chutnification As Future 87
Beyond the Wisdom Notebook: Museumification and Fabulography in The God of Small Things 99
1. Space, Education, and Identity in the Ayemenem House 104
2. The Ipe Family as Educators 108
3. Not Jam, Not Jelly: The twins as in-between 117
Embracing the Unexceptional: Education and the Postcolonial Everyday in Zadie Smith's White Teeth 135
1. "What Kind of a Place Was This?" Home in White Teeth 142
2. "More English than the English": Irie Jones as Model Minority 149
3. "Slouching Towards Bradford": Millat Iqbal as Problem Minority 158
4. "Inevitably, O'Connell's": Against an Education of Teleology 165
How to Swallow the World: A Conclusion 170
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File download under embargo until 22 May 2029 | 2023-03-30 10:27:32 -0400 | File download under embargo until 22 May 2029 |
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