Fables of the Tiger Economy: Species and Subalternity in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Abstract

Aravind Adiga’s 2008 novel The White Tiger appropriates an animal perspective in order to represent an animalization of the poor that runs counter to popular narratives of India’s economic growth; the novel uncritically deploys an anthropocentric perspective that is premised on the abjection of the animal and the sanctity of the human. At the same time, the narrative’s pivotal moment turns on the Deleuzo-Guattarian becoming-animal of the protagonist. This instance of mutual exposure transgresses humanist boundaries and infects the spaces of the text with a counter-narrative of contagion that suggests a different ethical potential for postcolonial, and posthumanist, representation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.