The doctoral dissertation in the field of English Language and Culture will be examined at the Philosophical Faculty at Joensuu campus.
What is the topic of your doctoral research? Why is it important to study the topic?
My dissertation examines dystopian imaginaries in which bleakness is constituted through the recurring figure of humans-as-waste. The major question is: who will live and who will be sacrificed? To address this question, this research brings sovereignty, biopolitics, and necropolitics into dialogue and conceptualizes ‘humans-as-waste’, an analytic category that identifies wasted bodies in dystopian narratives and traces the exclusionary patterns that produce them. In this research, dystopia is treated as a literary-critical site that provides readers with a ground to rethink life, politics, marginalization, and the definition of humanity.
Reading dystopia politically is as much a literary necessity as it is an ethical one because dystopia does not simply fictionalize or amplify catastrophic futurities toward which the real world is marching. Its storyworlds also reveal how life is biopolitically fractured and exposed to necropower.
What are the key findings or observations of your doctoral research?
The important contribution is the conceptualization of humans-as-waste, a politico-juridical and onto-epistemological figure combining a bare life, wasted lives, and discounted bodies. The theories of the three thinkers have been synthesized to this end: Giorgio Agamben for the juridico-political structure of abandonment, Zygmunt Bauman for the modern production of redundant populations, and Achille Mbembe for the necropolitical exposure to death. The readings of the selected dystopian narratives highlight that humans-as-waste, stripped of political and juridical rights and exposed to the power of death, appear recurrently in different forms: through war refugees dumped in camps in American War, indigenous community commodified in Tears of the Trufflepig, eastward immigrants in The Pesthouse, wasted bodies abandoned by sovereign law in The Bad Batch, the repressed and neglected garbage populations in Joker, and useless male bodies exposed to reproductive machinery in A Boy and His Dog.
The most significant finding is that those who are relegated to the level of waste resist through gesture, acts of withdrawal and profanation. For instance, Sarat Chestnut's hunger strike in American War, Esteban Bellacosa's crossing of the Ballí desert in Tears of the Trufflepig, and Arthur Fleck's profaning of the sanitized platform of Murray Franklin's TV show in Joker are such acts that suspend, although momentarily, the sovereign control. Also, the themes relating to the logic of interdependence, kinship, and rejection of the logic of purification have been highlighted and discussed as the gestures of utopian impulse in The Pesthouse, A Boy and His Dog and The Bad Batch. These findings indicate that dystopia does not foreclose the politics of hope.
The concept of ‘topographies of waste’ adds value to this research. It argues that deserted landscapes, ruined cities, (waste)lands, and excluded spaces in dystopian narratives have both aesthetic and political implications as they show us what it means to be regarded as waste, to inhabit (within) inhabitable spaces, and to survive in locations which are designated as non-valued. Simply put, a topography of waste exposes how sovereign power abandons both lives and landscapes in dystopian narratives. As for the scientific community, the concepts developed might appear relevant as they open up several new interdisciplinary directions for those working in the fields of literature and cultural studies.
How can the results of your doctoral research be utilised in practice?
The main impact of this dissertation is conceptual. Two of its concepts (humans-as-waste and topographies of waste) can be useful resources for the students of the humanities who wish to read dystopia and other literary genres politically. Also, the use of the camp as an analytical concept to highlight spatial-structural forms of dystopian texts may provide the researchers in the field of environmental humanities with a nuanced understanding of landscapes, deserts, and various locations in relation to disposability and exclusions.
What are the key research methods and materials used in your doctoral research?
The texts selected in the corpus for this investigation includes three novels and three films: American War (2017) by Omar El Akkad; Tears of the Trufflepig (2019) by Fernando A. Flores; The Pesthouse (2007) by Jim Crace; Joker (2019), directed by Todd Phillips; The Bad Batch (2017), directed by Ana Lily Amirpour; and A Boy and His Dog (1975), directed by L. Q. Jones.
The case studies were investigated through the theories of sovereignty and biopolitical-necropolitical frameworks. I have combined the theories of Giorgio Agamben, Zygmunt Bauman, and Achille Mbembe in order to conceptualize the central figure: humans-as-waste, and, apart from that, I have selectively drawn upon philosophical insights offered by Walter Benjamin, Slavoj Zizek, and Jean-Pierre Dupuy to situate dystopia as “the time of the now”.
Doctoral defence
Doctoral dissertation
Further information: Anupam Kamal Sen, [email protected]
