Performative Others: Sovereign Authority and Subaltern Community in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss
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This chapter aims to explore new forms of identification for the subaltern communities in the thought of performative identity embedded in Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss. Life in the contemporary political environment is compelled to shoulder the burden of colonial legacies and as well transnational cultural effects. One’s national and familial roots impart a sense of vulnerability that goes even more aggravated when on the route toward globalization. The performance of identity opens up certain degree of resistance that brings light to the subalterns’ aporia. In her novel, Desai deploys the art of sovereign power and subaltern resistance brilliantly via delving into the subaltern groups in the light of historical tensions that span decades and locations so as to look for a glimmer of strength. I first draw on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of inclusive exclusion to analyze the ethnic and class predicament to which the young and old generation in the novel are exposed and thus learn their otherness. Then, I move to examine Judith Butler’s performative identity with the take-up of Foucauldian subjectivation to argue that the weakness evokes unsettled resistance of and toward the Other. By probing how the characters in The Inheritance of Loss perform their identities, I argue that the repressed groups manifest three forms of resistanceassimilation, ethno-national linked diaspora, and separatism, which present the dynamic movements of subaltern resistance. What’s more, the subaltern performativity in Desai’s novel bridges personal desire and communal affiliation and thus renders a resonance with the ethics of the Other. Albeit the inferior cannot thoroughly replace the Centre which excludes them, the performative identification indeed links recognitions among subalterns and accordingly unfolds certain communal solidarity.