UC Riverside

This dissertation analyzes the representation of community in twenty-first-century Anglophone literature. I analyze how novels by Kamila Shamsie, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Adichie, Iain M. Banks, and Mohsin Hamid represent community in a context of globalization and find that community is imagined as a site of encounter with cultural heterogeneity. The novels are read comparatively with texts from the field of biopolitics, a field of continental philosophy that analyzes how notions of personhood, race, and humanity in the history of philosophy shaped governmental policy and vice versa. The first chapter develops literature and philosophy as a formal method for literary critics, defining the method as a conversation of concepts between texts. The following chapters read the novels in the context of philosophical arguments about community; the relationship between race, knowledge, and ethics; and concepts of personhood. The conclusion analyzes the implications of the chapters and argues that, in twenty-first-century Anglophone literature, encountering community faces characters with problems of using language in increasingly hybrid and complex communities, problems of uneven knowledge in and about shared spaces, and that the novels imagine more inclusive systems of citizenship and political territory as a result of advancing technology.