scholarly journals Dwelling, Dispossession, and “Slow Violence” in the Time of Climate Change The Representation of Refugees in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Il Tolomeo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Pilia
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human History ◽  
Amitav Ghosh ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Slow Violence ◽  
The Sundarbans

In this essay, I will analyse the crucial issues of dwelling and dispossession concerning refugees in the novel The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh. Political and environmental displacement is addressed within the framework of ‘slow violence’ as proposed by the landmark work of Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). With the intention to define the Morichjhãpi refugees as a foreshadowing of the climate migrations involving the lives of the subalterns in South Asia, as argued by Brandon Jones (2018), the essay provides a historical background of the Morichjhãpi Massacre and studies the forced eviction narrated in the novel through the pages of Nirmal’s diary. Together with Kusum, the Marxist professor experiences the tragedy of the subalterns in the ever-changing ecosystem of the Sundarbans, bridging the gap between environmental and postcolonial categories while providing fruitful insights within the notions of human history and ecological deep time.

Climate Change and Agriculture in South Asia

10.1596/26792 ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Laborde ◽  
Csilla Lakatos ◽  
Gerald Nelson ◽  
Richard Robertson ◽  
Marcelle Thomas ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
South Asia

Mary Barton

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Deep Sympathy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Class Community

‘It's the masters as has wrought this woe; it's the masters as should pay for it.’ Set in Manchester in the 1840s - a period of industrial unrest and extreme deprivation - Mary Barton depicts the effects of economic and physical hardship upon the city's working-class community. Paralleling the novel's treatment of the relationship between masters and men, the suffering of the poor, and the workmen's angry response, is the story of Mary herself: a factory-worker's daughter who attracts the attentions of the mill-owner's son, she becomes caught up in the violence of class conflict when a brutal murder forces her to confront her true feelings and allegiances. Mary Barton was praised by contemporary critics for its vivid realism, its convincing characters and its deep sympathy with the poor, and it still has the power to engage and move readers today. This edition reproduces the last edition of the novel supervised by Elizabeth Gaskell and includes her husband's two lectures on the Lancashire dialect.

scholarly journals Fathoming postnatural oceans: Towards a low trophic theory in the practices of feminist posthumanities

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110285
Author(s):  
Marietta Radomska ◽  
Cecilia Åsberg
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Marine Pollution ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Slow Violence ◽  
Human Care ◽  
Ethical Stance ◽  
The Baltic

As the planet’s largest ecosystem, oceans stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO2 and host unfathomable biodiversity at a deep time-scale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that the oceans are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future societies. Human-induced impacts range from climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication and marine pollution to local degradation of marine and coastal environments. Such environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like oil spills and ‘slow violence’, occurring gradually and out of sight. The purpose of this paper is to show four cases of coastal and marine forms of slow violence and to provide counter-accounts of how to reinvent our consumer imaginary at such locations, as well as to develop what is here referred to as ‘low-trophic theory,’ a situated ethical stance that attends to entanglements of consumption, food, violence, environmental adaptability and more-than-human care from the co-existential perspective of multispecies ethics. We combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, environmental art and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea region and feminist posthumanities. The paper shows that the oceanic imaginary is not a unified place, but rather, a set of forces, which requires renewed ethical approaches, conceptual inventiveness and practical creativity. Based on the case studies and examples presented, the authors conclude that the consideration of more-than-human ethical perspectives, provided by environmental arts and humanities is crucial for both research on nature and space, and for the flourishing of local multispecies communities. This paper thus inaugurates thinking and practice along the proposed here ethical stance of low-trophic theory, developed it along the methodological lines of feminist environmental posthumanities.

Bodies of the Anthropocene: On the interactive plasticity of earth systems and biological organisms

2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110015
Author(s):  
Maurizio Meloni ◽  
Rachael Wakefield-Rann ◽  
Becky Mansfield
Keyword(s):  
Anthropogenic Effects ◽  
Cellular Activity ◽  
Micro Scale ◽  
Earth Systems ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Genomic Regulation ◽  
Slow Violence ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Induced Changes ◽  
Biological Organisms

The Anthropocene literature has brought attention to the plasticity and porosity of Earth systems under the dramatic impact of human activities. Moving across scales of analysis, this paper focuses attention on anthropogenic effects at the micro-scale of genomic regulation, neuronal functioning and cellular activity. Building on expanding dialogues at the interface of Anthropocene science, biogeography, microbiology and ecotoxicology, we mobilize epigenetic findings to show increasing evidence of anthropogenic changes in plants, animals and human bodies. Treating human-induced changes at the macro-global and micro-biological scales as part of an intertwined process has implications for how these problems are conceptualised and addressed. While we are sceptics about major geo-bio-social syntheses, we believe that agile social-scientific tools can facilitate interaction across disciplines without denying unevenness, and differences. If rightly contextualized in broad anthropological and social science frameworks, biosocial work on epigenetics offers a compelling avenue to make detectable the ‘slow violence’ of everyday pollution, racism, inequalities and the disproportionate impact of the Anthropocene on the poor and vulnerable. Consolidating work at the Anthropocene/biology interface has potential to offer a richer and more complete picture of the present crisis at the macro and micro-scale alike.

scholarly journals Transformation as praxis: responding to climate change uncertainties in marginal environments in South Asia

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 110-117
Author(s):  
Lyla Mehta ◽  
Shilpi Srivastava ◽  
Synne Movik ◽  
Hans Nicolai Adam ◽  
Rohan D’Souza ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Marginal Environments

Oil, Water, World, Wax, Mind: Jean Rolin’s Ormuz

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-236
Author(s):  
Thangam Ravindranathan
Keyword(s):  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
World Order ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Amitav Ghosh ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oil Water ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Oil Tankers

Abstract This essay considers the unworldly setting of Jean Rolin’s novel Ormuz (2013), composed around the attempt by a shadowy character named Wax to swim across the Strait of Hormuz. This twenty-one-nautical-mile-wide stretch of sea separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, through which is shipped 35 percent of the world’s petroleum, is a waterway of the utmost geopolitical importance, its harbors built not for dreamy swimmers but for giant oil tankers and the elaborate maritime-military infrastructure assuring their passage. Such a setting would seem to stand as a bleak other to the novel as genre. Yet if one thinks of the history of the novel as inseparable from that of carbon capitalism (as Amitav Ghosh has argued), such a claim is reversed—this site where powerful strategic interests drive the flow of oil, capital, and power is the place of the continual making and unmaking, by night and day, of the world order, and thereby of the modern novel. The essay reflects on what Wax’s weird wager—as an emblem for a remarkable narrative wager—may owe to such intertexts as Google, Descartes’s Meditations, and Jules Verne’s Tour du monde, and argues for reading Ormuz as an ecological novel for our times.

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