Contesting narrativizations in contemporary fictions of citizenship

This thesis asks whether literary fiction can contest narrativization and formulate a site beyond its parameters for reimagining the material conditions of citizenship. I define ‘narrativization’ as the state-sanctioned regulations by which subjects are required to account for themselves. I examine three agents – asylum and immigration systems; the literary marketplace; and the heteronormative protocols of the nation-state – as institutions that place demands on how precarious subjects articulate their subjecthoods. This thesis is about the literary representation of those who either cannot, or are excluded from, participation in upholding the narrativizing demands of such institutions. I analyse six contemporary novels: Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009); Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007); Sinan Antoon’s The Book of Collateral Damage (2019); Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors (2019); Mendez’s Rainbow Milk (2020); and Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night (2020), to explore various strategies of resistance to such regulation of life within the domain of the nation-state. This thesis examines the possibilities negotiated by literary narratives to disrupt these demands, and the opportunities for alternative accounts of subjecthood to emerge out of this disruption. In each of my three chapters, I register a different means of resisting narrativization, and interrogate the extent to which each strategy mounts a sustained challenge, or not. I examine how literary texts enact evasions of narrativization, reveal the politics of its representation, and how modes beyond compromised linguistic narrative-telling might prove discoverable. My final chapter argues that the opportunities for contesting narrativization best lie in mobilising ‘queering’ as a critical framework. By invoking its disruption, a generative mode of articulating subjecthood beyond the restrictions of narrativization is possible. Employing this more widely allows us to actively unsettle the parameters of narrativization within and beyond literary narrative, to reimagine a more inclusive citizenship practice.