Date of Award
Fall 10-10-2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Sonali Perera
Second Advisor
Tanya Agathocleous
Academic Program Adviser
Janet Neary
Abstract
Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger, represents gender hierarchies and the class struggle of India’s neoliberal present. Adiga uses elements of satire and allegory to teach us something about how women are differently positioned in the neoliberal system. David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (2). I will consider the novel, alongside Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” and Betty Joseph’s “Neoliberalism and Allegory,” in relation to the class divide and representation of rural and urban women in the neoliberal setting of The White Tiger. I argue that the intranational class divisions complicate and texture general (and hegemonic) formulas of “third world” women. Over the course of my thesis, I attempt to unpack the binary structures of light and dark, rural and urban, modern and backward through an investigation of the characters Kusum and Pinky Madam.
Recommended Citation
Madimi, Sneha, "The Structures of Intra-national Class Divisions in Neoliberalism: The women of “light” and “dark” in The White Tiger" (2022). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/946
Included in
Asian American Studies Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons, Other English Language and Literature Commons, Women's Studies Commons