Hostname: page-component-77f85d65b8-7lfxl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-03-29T22:17:57.616Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Can the Sublime Be Postcolonial? Aesthetics, Politics, and Environment in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2014

Jana María Giles
Jana María Giles*
Affiliation:
University of Louisiana–Monroe
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Set in the vast Sundarban mangrove forest of Bangladesh in the shadow of the colonial past and the 1979 Morichjhapi massacre, The Hungry Tide traces the transformation of three metropolitan characters from disengaged spectators to invested insiders. The novel may be read as elaborating the theories of Jean-François Lyotard, whose revision of the sublime as the “differend” in both aesthetics and politics provides a compelling context for exploring the postcolonial sublime. Suggesting ecocentric ways of engaging the world that loosen the bonds of the colonial past and critiquing the failure of the postcolonial state and the new cosmopolitanism, Ghosh rewrites aesthetics as interconnected with ethics and politics. In his novel, the postcolonial sublime no longer reifies metaphysical or anthropocentric pure reason, but instead enables discovery of our interpenetration with the natural world, spurring us to witnessing and activism in partnership with those who have been rendered silent and invisible.

Keywords

SublimeJean-François LyotardPostcolonial theoryEnvironmentalismEcocriticismAnthropoceneAmitav Ghosh

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , September 2014 , pp. 223 - 242
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 Clark, Timothy, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, 120.

2 “Researcher’s Warning Helps Save Lives in Bangladesh,” Coastal Clips, Louisiana Sea Grant College Program, Louisiana State University. Winter 2007. http://www.laseagrant.org/pdfs/CC_No9_Winter07.pdf. Accessed June, 2014.

3 “Background,” Project Tiger, Ministry of Environment, Government of India. June 6, 2014. http://projecttiger.nic.in/content/107_1_Background.aspx. Accessed June 7, 2014.

4 Kaur, Rajender, “‘Home Is Where the Orcaella Are’: Toward a New Paradigm of Transcultural Ecocritical Engagement in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 14.1 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 128.

5 Gikandi, Simon, Maps of Englishness Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 14.

6 Susmita Dasgupta, Mainul Huq, Zahirul Huq Khan, Manjur Murshed Zahid Ahmed, Nandan Mukherjee, Malik Fida Khan, and Kiran Pandey, “Vulnerability of Bangladesh to Cyclones in a Changing Climate: Potential Damages and Adaptation Cost,” Policy Research Working Paper 5280, The World Bank. April 2010. http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/1813-9450-5280. Accessed April 6, 2013.

7 Estimates of the number of persons who will have to move by 2050 due to climate change and environmental degradation range from 25 million to 1 billion, according to the International Organization for Migration. “Interactive Fact Sheet.” Accessed March 29, 2014. The IOM states that migration, climate change, and the environment form a complex nexus, which “needs to be addressed in a holistic manner.” “Migration and Climate Change,” International Organization for Migration. http://www.iom.int/Template/migration-climate-change-environmental-degradation/interactive-factsheet/index.html. Accessed March 29, 2014.

8 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43.1 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 2.

9 Stoekl, Allan, “‘After the Sublime,’ After the Apocalypse: Two Versions of Sustainability in Light of Climate Change,” Diacritics 41.3 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 44.

10 Ibid., 44.

11 Ibid., 45.

12 Ibid., 48–49.

13 Ibid., 50–51.

14 Lyotard, Jean-François, “After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics,” The Inhuman, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, 140, 142; Stoekl, 52.

15 Stoekl, 53.

16 Ibid., 53; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 213. See also Frances Ferguson on climate change criticism presenting “a sublime ethics.” Frances Ferguson, “Climate Change and Us,” Diacritics 41.3 (2013): 37.

17 Morton, Timothy, “She Stood in Tears Amid the Alien Corn: Thinking through Agrilogistics.” Diacritics 41.3 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 94.

18 Aravamudan, Srinivas, “The Catachronism of Climate Change,” Diacritics 41.3 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 12.

19 Chakrabarty, , “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” 222Google Scholar.

20 Huggan, Graham and Tiffin, Helen, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 12–14Google Scholar.

21 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Foreword Mary J. Gregor (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987)Google Scholar, 99.

22 See, for instance: Hamann, Johann Georg, “Metacritique on the Purism of Reason,” What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, trans. Kenneth Haynes, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996), 154–167Google Scholar; Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 18–19Google Scholar, 25; Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1973), 211–299Google Scholar; Beck, Lewis White, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 200–201Google Scholar; Goldmann, Lucien, Immanuel Kant, trans. Robert Black (London: NLB, 1971)Google Scholar, 132; Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” §§ 23–29, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, 55; Caygill, Howard, The Art of Judgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar, 139, 349; Guyer, Paul, Kant and the Claims of Taste 2e (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, 18; Kirwan, James, Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 57–61Google Scholar, 63.

23 Kant, , Critique of Judgment, 69Google Scholar; Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason 3e, trans. Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993), 9–10Google Scholar.

24 Kant, , Critique of Judgment, 106Google Scholar.

25 Ibid., 114–15.

26 Ibid., 113.

27 Ibid., 124.

28 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2–30Google Scholar.

29 Nayar, Pramod K., English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar, 30.

30 Ibid., 65.

31 Ibid., 76–77.

32 Ghosh, Amitav, The Hungry Tide (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 42–44Google Scholar.

33 Ibid., 235–37.

34 Recent studies include Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; eds. Boehmer, Elleke and Morton, Stephen, Terror and the Postcolonial (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2010)Google Scholar; Bahri, Deepika, Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)Google Scholar; ed. Mitchell, W.J.T., Landscape and Power 2e (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

35 Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” §§ 23–29, 123.

36 Ibid., 233–34. For Lyotard, as for contemporary cultural theorists and cognitive neuroscientists of embodied cognition, emotion and feeling are physical experiences, not metaphysical. Here metaphysics means either the spiritually transcendent or the notion of pure discursive reason. Kant, in his pursuit of pure practical reason, wanted to divorce the essence of being human from any contingencies arising from the natural, bodily, or emotional.

37 Ibid., 188–89.

38 Lyotard, , “After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics,” 143Google Scholar.

39 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 137–138Google Scholar.

40 Shaw, Philip, The Sublime (London and New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar, 116.

41 For the definitions of biocentrism and anthropocentrism, see Callicott, J. Baird, “Environmental Ethics: I. Overview,” Encyclopedia of Bioethics 3e, ed. Stephen Post, Vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004), 757–769Google Scholar. Global Issues in Context. http://find.galegroup.com/gic/infomark.do?&idigest=fb720fd31d9036c1ed2d1f3a0500fcc2&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=GIC&docId=CX3402500165&source=gale&userGroupName=itsbtrial&version=1.0. Accessed March 17, 2013.

42 Lyotard, , “After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics,” 88Google Scholar.

43 Ibid., 104.

44 Lyotard, , The Differend, 8–13Google Scholar.

45 Ibid., 156–57.

46 Ibid., 13, 181.

47 Lyotard, Jean-François, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar, 67.

48 Nayar, Pramod K, “The Postcolonial Uncanny: The Politics of Dispossession in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide,” College Literature 37.4 (2010)Google Scholar: 112.

49 Buell, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1995)Google Scholar, 7.

50 Ghosh, 221.

51 Ibid., 7.

52 Ibid., 58.

53 Ibid., 6–7.

54 Ibid., 125.

55 Ibid., 42.

56 Ibid., 69.

57 Ibid., 172.

58 Ibid., 66.

59 Ibid., 67.

60 Mukherjee, Pablo, “Surfing the Second Waves: Amitav Ghosh’s Tide Country,” New Formations 59 (2006): 151–152Google Scholar.

61 Nayar, , The Postcolonial Uncanny, 108Google Scholar.

62 Ghosh, 222–23.

63 Ibid., 265.

64 Ibid., 266.

65 Ibid., 270.

66 Kant, , Critique of Judgment, 396Google Scholar.

67 Lyotard, , Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” §§ 23–29, 11Google Scholar.

68 Ghosh, 272.

69 Ibid., 202.

70 Ibid., 329.

71 Lyotard, , The Differend, 13Google Scholar.

72 Ghosh, 94.

73 Ibid., 78.

74 Ibid., 78.

75 Mukherjee, 152.

76 Ghosh, 31.

77 Ibid., 83.

78 Ibid., 118.

79 Ibid., 222.

80 Lyotard, , The Differend, 70Google Scholar.

81 Ghosh, 132.

82 Ibid., 172.

83 Ibid., 279.

84 Ibid., 118–19.

85 Kaur, 135.

86 Ghosh, 242–44.

87 Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, “Ghost of Marichjhapi returns to haunt,” Hindustan Times. HT Media. April 25, 2011. http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Kolkata/Ghost-of-Marichjhapi-returns-to-haunt/Article1-689463.aspx. Accessed March 17, 2013; Mallick, Ross, “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre,” The Journal of Asian Studies 58.1 (1999): 104–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Ghosh, 248.

89 Ibid., 217.

90 Huggan and Tiffin, 188.

91 R.R. Reeves, T.A. Jefferson, L. Karczmarski, K. Laidre, G. O’Corry-Crowe, L. Rojas-Bracho, E.R. Secchi, E. Slooten, B.D. Smith, J.Y. Wang, and K. Zhou, “Orcaellabrevirostris,” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Version 2012.2, International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/15419/0. Accessed April 6, 2013.

92 Ghosh, 249.

93 Anna Tsing, quoted in Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2008), 218.

94 Wolfe, Carey, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species and Posthumanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 43.

95 Lyotard, , The Differend, 8–13Google Scholar.

96 Ibid., 157.

97 Ibid., 181.

98 Carroll, David, “Rephrasing the Political with Kant and Lyotard: From Aesthetic to Political Judgments,” Diacritics 14.3 (1984)Google Scholar: 83.

99 Ibid., 87.

100 Lyotard, , The Differend, 13Google Scholar.

101 Ghosh, 59.

102 Ibid., 211.

103 Mukherjee, 153.

104 Ghosh, 233.

105 Tomsky, Terri, “Amitav Ghosh’s Anxious Witnessing and the Ethics of Action in The Hungry Tide,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.1 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 64.

106 Nayar, , The Postcolonial Uncanny, 114Google Scholar.

107 Li, Victor, “Necroidealism, or the Subaltern’s Sacrificial Death,” Interventions 11.3 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 290.

108 Ghosh, 111–12.

109 Critics who emphasize Fokir’s death as a sacrifice tend to overlook Nirmal’s sacrifice.

110 Ghosh, 140.

111 Ibid., 329.

112 Ibid., 85, 126–27.

113 Ibid., 85–88.

114 Ibid., 185.

115 Ibid., 184.

116 Ibid., 186.

117 Ibid., 186.

118 Ibid., 194.

119 Ibid., 195.

120 Ibid., 205–06.

121 Clark, 120.

122 Ibid., 122.

123 Ibid., 125.

124 Ghosh, 104–05.

125 Ibid., 291.

126 Ibid., 292.

127 Ibid., 298.

128 Ibid., 298.

129 Ibid., 301.

130 Ibid., 48, 144, 321.

131 Ibid., 321.

132 Ibid., 324.

133 Ibid., 321.

134 Dasgupta, et al.

135 Ghosh, 321.

136 Kaur, 135.

137 Ghosh, 150.

138 Lyotard, Jean-François, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985)Google Scholar, 85.