The Spatiality of Unpleasant Feelings in Manu Joseph’s Serious Men

Abstract

While scholars have paid attention to the workings of neoliberal fantasies and misogynistic views in Manu Joseph’s novel Serious Men (2010), Joseph’s employment of unpleasant feelings has largely remained unexplored. This article examines the novel’s engagement with unpleasant feelings such as agitation, envy, and vengeance to highlight the tripartite connections between neoliberalism, casteism, and heteropatriarchy in present-day India. Drawing insights from postcolonial studies, affect studies, and critical caste studies, it demonstrates that in Serious Men, public and institutional spaces engender socially marginalized and emotionally wounded subjects by shaping their unpleasant feelings. Specifically, the article builds on and extends Sianne Ngai’s theorization of “ugly feelings” and works with the concept of the spatiality of unpleasant feelings to chart Joseph’s depictions of neoliberal spaces and their affects, the deep-rooted feelings and psychological compulsions of his characters, and the ordinary violence of casteism and heteropatriarchy that is normalized in India. Subsequently, it argues that by employing the unpleasant feelings of the Dalit protagonist and the only woman scientist in the novel, Joseph underlines the intersections between caste hierarchies and gender hierarchies and invites us to think about the gap between unpleasant feelings that are reasonable and the unjust actions these feelings lead to.