Performative authorship: engaging with the problem of authorial identity in Meena Kandasamy’s Exquisite Cadavers

Abstract The late postmodern fiction has seen a remarkable shift in the concept of authorship. From mid twentieth century theoretical assertions proclaiming the author as dead to later movements that advocated for the author’s reinstatement, the discourse on authorship has undergone a radical transformation, profoundly reshaping the concept of authorial identity. Contrary to the conventional understanding of author as the dispassionate medium through which the literary discourse emerges, the contemporary writers perceive authorship as inherently performative. The act of writing novels becomes a performative endeavour because authors began to use literary medium of expression to perform their authorial identity and illustrate ways of becoming an author . The paper attempts to explore the ways in which Meena Kandasamy, one of the prominent Indian English writers, through her stylistic experimentation with the novelistic form, assertively constructs and establishes her authorial agency and performs her becoming in the novel Exquisite Cadavers . The paper looks at how writers from the margins perform and carve a distinct authorial identity for themselves through the process of writing literary texts. In order to examine the different performative strategies of becoming employed by the author, the paper draws extensively on Songa Longolius’s theory on the performative model of authorship.