Kindred freedom narratives: fetishism and postcoloniality in Forster, Gandhi and Joyce

Situated within seminal debates on the questions of liberation and justice viewed from the postcolonial context, this dissertation evaluates freedom narratives from both sides of the colonial divide during the period of high imperialism. Creating a transnational grouping of three diverse historical figures, E. M. Forster, M. K. Gandhi, and James Joyce, I argue for similarities in these writers’ narrative construction of “freedom” against colonial modernity. I argue that despite these writers’ widely disparate historical and cultural determinations, which uniquely particularize each of their freedom formulas as well as freedom “ideals” – the ideal of culture for Forster, renunciation for Gandhi and aesthetic apprehension for Joyce, these writers conceive of a commensurate/globally related form of “freedom” as postcoloniality and demonstrate cosmopolitan ambition. I also argue that the global form of postcoloniality they each practice can only be articulated through a close attention to each of their specific and local difference.

The key contribution of the dissertation is to establish a new significance of the notion of fetishism for postcolonial studies, from both historical and theoretical perspectives. From a background that emphasizes the primacy of the concept of fetishism in its historical evolution within colonizing narratives of various Western discourses, especially fetish’s constitutive role in Enlightenment philosophy’s othering narrative of “primitive” natives, the work foregrounds a novel theoretical and narrative insight that the fetish demonstrates a unique potential to articulate/embody freedom as post-coloniality. Through a detailed critical analysis of each freedom narrative, I demonstrate how the clashes of particular contradictory cultural ideologies, in fact, determine each freedom narrative and how these contradictions are projected onto and galvanized by a fetish object(s). The work extends the ideas of Sigmund Freud, William Pietz, Homi Bhabha, Anne McClintock and Jacques Derrida on fetishism. Employing the framework of fetishism it brings into view similarities among the said three writers’ definition and practice of freedom. The work weighs in on critical debates between Marxist and Post-structural camps in postcolonial studies and proposes a new form of cosmopolitanism.