Abstract
Be it the slave narratives of the American South or the independence chronicles of India and its 1,001 midnight’s children, the conditions of colonialism—including national subjugation, physical and psychological dislocation, and the processes of hegemony—as expressed in literature walk hand-in-hand with the trope of body-as-text. The corpus of the subjugated human figure has been, for centuries, used as the canvas for the traumas of colonialism. In light of the concurrent shifts from the twentieth to twenty-first century and postcolonialism to a generation of post-postcolonialism, there has also emerged a shift in the use of body-as-text—where the physical body is inscribed with the trauma indicative of an historically colonial struggle—to a new trope of text-as-body in which the literal, published text adopts, reflects, and represents the body and consciousness of the post-postcolonial subject. Text-as-body borrows its co-name, literary transubstantiation, from the Roman Catholic tradition, and just as the bread and wine of the Eucharist is transformed into the body and blood of Christ, so too is the text (consumed and shared by the public) the transubstantiated body of the diasporic writer. All of the amalgamated parts of the diasporic individual—the many heritages, many cultures, many voices, many languages, and many roots—are represented within the text via three central phenomenon of the literary transubstantiation trope: specific formal structure based on non-linear chronology and heightened poly-vocality; presentation of the body of the older (postcolonial) generation through the traditional body-as-text and, more specifically, through amputation and phantom pains; and finally, the repeated and benevolent use of Lucifer as a counter-hegemonic divinity figure. This thesis is built upon the research of many different scholars across several disciplines. The nature of the (emergent) critical theory as well as of my own argument regarding text-as-body require a skillful combination of multidisciplinary scholarship that, in no small way, reflects the complexity of the genre itself. Scholarship that has been, thus far, central to my research include Bill Ashcroft’s The Empire Writes Back, Wendy W. Walter’s At Home in Diaspora, William Gass’s “The Philosophical Significance of Exile,” and Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands. Moreover, I have reached out to medical and psychological research in order to understand the significance of amputation and phantom limb pain within these novels, and Today’s Missal, paired with religious scholarship relating to transubstantiation, has aided in articulating the fullness with which these authors’ novels become extensions of the post-postcolonial body and consciousness. “(Corpo)reality” explores three central phenomena of literary transubstantiation within Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Malika Mokeddem’s Of Dreams and Assassins, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. These phenomena allow for the successful transition from the use of the corporeal body as a storyboard of the postcolonial experience—body-as-text—into an era of text-as-body which allows the text produced by an author to absorb and reproduce the post-postcolonial consciousness.