The natural domination of capitalism: Darwinist organicism and the perverse postcolonial fantasy in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland

Abstract

Jhumpa Lahiri's status as a prominent author of ‘post colonial literature’ necessitates a probing of her fiction's ‘macro-politics’, a rigorous demystification of her ideological and political sympathies and antipathies. Situating Lahiri's post colonialism must clarify her stance on geo-political and economic developments of the last seventy years. It must inevitably engage with the debates on issues such as neo-liberalism, imperialism and neo-conservative military interventionism, so far not adequately addressed by the critical literature. In the following essay, we propose that a ‘macro-political’ reading of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland could furnish us with the answers that are crucial to the field of postcolonial studies and its self-criticism. A close reading of the narrative, as a politically biased historiography, reveals a deployment of social Darwinist (evolutionary) doctrine coupled with a rather crude dismissal of leftist opposition amounting to an apologetics for neo-liberal capitalism and its aggressively interventionist ‘foreign policy’. This regime has proved increasingly incapable of self-justification, indicated by the current rise of populism and the ‘environmentalist’ movement on a global scale. Furthermore, we will try to draw parallels between this crisis and twentieth-century fascism. Max Horkheimer's analysis will shed light on the novel's ideological content and that, for all its overt unflagging apologetics, it brings to the surface the acute systemic contradictions of neo-liberal capitalism. Today's crisis ties the viability of the future of organised human life to a revolutionary systemic upheaval, and Lahiri's consigning of precisely such revolutionary politics to juvenile utopianism becomes a peculiarly untenable act of denial and projection.