Subalternidade e exclusão nas obras O deus das pequenas coisas e O ministério da felicidade absoluta, de Arundhati Roy

Abstract

For a long time, the view of the East by the West was guided by representations that served the ideology of the European’s superiority, leading consciously and deterministically to subordination. In Orientalism, the Orient as the Invention of the West (1990), Edward Said demonstrates that the legitimacy of the European's control over the Orient took place through the establishment of a negative construct, which proves the intimate relationship between discourse and power. On the other hand, the very constitution of societies in the East, in some cases, favored the maintenance of this subordination, as, for example, in India, where ethnic and religious diversity and the caste system give rise to the perpetuation of a stigmatizing social stratification. In addition, as Gayatri Spivak (2010) argued in the essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, there is still the double condition of women’s subalternity in Indian society. Based on theoretical texts by Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, and others, this thesis proposes an analysis of the representation of subalternity in The God of Small Things (2008) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), by Arundhati Roy, in its various aspects: in relation to the former colonizer and as for the relationship of gender and caste.