NECROIDEALISM, OR THE SUBALTERN'S SACRIFICIAL DEATH

Abstract

Dipesh Chakrabarty admits that the subaltern who wholly resists incorporation by dominant state forms is ‘an ideal figure,’ a utopian concept designating the limits of hegemonic thought. I wish to argue that such a utopian ideal may find its most convincing but problematic representation in the figure of the dead subaltern. In death, the subaltern is perfected as a concept so pure no living referent can contradict or complicate it. As in utopian thinking, it is the subaltern's non-existence that ensures the possibility of its conceptualization as a critical alternative to existing hegemonies. Through a reading of Ranajit Guha's essay ‘Chandra's Death’, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, I will show how the immortalization of the subaltern involves a troubling logic of sacrifice and necroidealization that replaces the messiness and ambiguity of struggle with the reassurance of an aestheticized political ideal.

Keywords:

• aesthetics
• alterity
• necroidealism
• sacrifice
• subaltern
• utopianism

Notes

¹For further discussion of Povinelli, Spivak and primitivism, see Li (2006).

²Consider, for instance, Murlidharan, the naked, homeless, armless, ‘level-crossing lunatic’ (Roy 1997: 60) whose abjection can surely neither be apotheosized nor aestheticized. The novel's attention on him is brief, in contrast to its lingering gaze on Velutha's muscular physique.