A Discourse of Agency: Recentering the Individual in Arundhati Roy’s Nonfiction

Abstract

This paper seeks to read Arundhati Roy's select nonfictional writings in the context of Edward Said's theory on intellectual and secular humanism. By bringing her nonfictional prose in conversation with theoretical framework of secular intellectual the paper argues that Roy's recenters individual agency to provide an ethical critique of late modern capitalism and other exploitative structures like cultural supremacism, racism, gender apartheid and neoimperialism.