Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Amitav Ghosh'

Hybridity has been a privileged theory in post-colonial writings. It is considered as a source of empowerment that resists oppositional binarism and monolithic discourses that characterize dominant Western historical representations. Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land and his ongoing Ibis Trilogy are historiographic projects that instantiate, both textually and formally, the employment of hybridity in resistance of cultural and political suppression. However, Ghosh at the same time interrogates the discourse of hybridity by highlighting its problematics. Such ambivalent stance creates a paradox that the author leaves open as a site for critical debates. Employing the strength of hybridity, Ghosh rewrites history and challenges the critiques that disapprove the theory for its lack of ethics and suggests that the theory of hybridity can fulfill our ethical imperatives by excavating forgotten voices of the past.
published_or_final_version
English Studies
Master
Master of Arts

A literatura indiana de lingua inglesa desenvolveu uma identidade própria desde que o gênero romance foi levado para o subcontinente indiano pelos ingleses no século XIX. O encontro desse romance com as narrativas orais e as tradições locais favoreceu um tratamento diferente do tempo e do espaço nas obras. Esta disertação tem por objetivo analisar dois romances de Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (1988) e The Hungry Tide (2004), tendo como foco as questões relativas ao tempo e ao espaço, às fronteiras, às grandes e perquenas narrativas e às figuras femininas nelas retratadas. Ao ultrapassar os limites impostos pelos ideais nacionalistas e patriarcais, a mulher dos romances de Amitav Ghosh cruza as fronteiras culturais e sociais, rompendo com os padrões atribuídos a ela. Sua capacidade de transformar um espaço, vista antes como uma tribuição do homem, é folcalizada nas duas obras estudadas. Se Ghosh questiona as grandes narratibas em contraponto com as pequenas, as quais retratam as pessoas excluídas da historiografia oficial, e redefinem o papel da mulher na sociedade que atua, quais são os conflitos gerados por esse contraponto? O ato de cruzar das fronteiras é um espaço simbólico das transformações e rupturas originadas pela ação feminina ou elas não dependem da mulher? Na nossa apreciação, a agência política da mulher propicia tais transformações, devido às rupturas ligadas ao processo do deslocamento, e acontecem em dois níveis: no sujeito, na busca identitária do pertecimento, analisada no primeiro capítulo com o romance The Shadow Lines, e no da prática social pela agência do próprio sujeito, assim como apresentado no romance The Hungry Tide. Um dos tópicos analisados na dissertação é a representação da mulher como agente dessas rupturas por meio dos diferentes recursos textuais usados pelo narrador. Desde uma perspectiva da teoria pós -colonial, destacamos nas duas obras o uso de paralelismos históricos e sociais como via de entendimento dos dramas e lutas pessoais. Tendo a consciência de que todas as narrativas, sejam oficiais ou secundárias, caminham lado a lado estabelecendo relações conflituosas, ressaltando o papel das personagens femininas, cujos recorrentes deslocamentos questionam e problematizam os paradigmas sociais vigentes e constroem espaços simbólicos que se configuram pelo cruzamento de fronteiras geográficas e sócio-culturais.
Indian literature in english has developed its own identity since the genre novel was taken to the Indian subcontinent by the British in the 19th century. The encounter of the novel with the oral narratives and the local traditions made different ways of dealing with space and time in the works possible. The main purpose of this dissertation is to analyse two of Amitav Ghosh\'s novels, The Shadow Lines (1988) and The Hungry Tide (2004), focusing on the questions related to time and space, frontiers, history, and stories and the female characters depicted in them. Crossing the borders imposed by nationalist and patriarcal ideals, woman ideals, womam in Ghosh\'s novels crosses cultural and social frontiers, breaking stereotypes and social patterns given to them. Her ability to transform a space, normally dominated by men, is studied in the two novels. If Ghosh questions history as opposed to stories which depict peopel excluded from national historiography, redefining the woman\'s role in the society where she lives, which are the conflicts that spring from this opposition? Is the act of crossing borders a symbolic space of transformation and ruputures caused by female action, or do these ruptures not depend on the women? According to our view, woman\'s political agency provides these transformations, due to the broken bonds resulting from the process of dislocation, and they happen on two levels: the level of the subject , in her desire for bellonging, analyzed in the first chapter with the novel The Shadow Lines, and the level of social practice by the subject agency, as represented in the novel The Hungry Tide. Onde of the themes analyzed in this dissertation is the representation of woman as the agent of these ruptures through different literary approaches used by the narrator.Following the post-colonialtheory, we highlight in the two novels the use of historical and social parallelisms as a means of understanding the dramas and human predicaments. Being aware that all narratives, primary or secondary, have the same background, establishing conflicting relations, we point out the role of female characters, whose various displacements question and challenge the existing social paradigms and construct symbolic spaces which are built up by crossing geographical, social and cultural frontiers.

To date no single critic has yet published a monograph charting the development of Amitav Ghosh's fiction. Yet Ghosh is one of the most distinctive and influential writers to come out of India since Rushdie and, with five novels already published at the age of forty-seven, his fiction is continuing to develop in ambition and scope. This thesis is an attempt to fill the critical gap by providing a sustained account of Ghosh's writing. I contend that at the heart of his corpus is the argument that knowledge is produced by structures of dominance, particularly the military, economic, and epistemic strategies of colonialism. In the Introduction I set out my methodological parameters, tracing the debate about knowledge and power through Foucault's conceptualization of power as a pervasive set of social relations; Said's recognition that contemporary thought has been crucially shaped by colonialism; and arriving at Bhabha's insight that, colonial models of power and knowledge are ambivalent, split, and self-contradictory. Threaded through this discussion I provide tangible examples, from colonial texts and art, which cast new light on the theories. The Introduction then turns to Ghosh's writing, particularly focusing on the way in which his interrogation of borderlines - between nations, discursive fields, and genres - sends out a challenge to the compartmentalization of much Western thought. I discuss Ghosh's novels in chronological order, suggesting that in each of them he examines the imbrication of at least one specific form of knowledge in colonial power structures. In Chapter One, I discuss representations of science in The Circle of Reason. I argue that science has often been regarded as a legitimate and legitimizing form of knowledge that is disinterested, culturally neutral, benevolent in intention, and allowing access to objective 'truth'. Recent theorists, however, have indicated that science is culturally located, with its own biases and interests. Western science and technology helped both to establish and consolidate power in an active way in colonized countries, and also provided a moral justification for imperial nations to continue their exploitation of Asia and Africa. Yet, through the character of Balaram, Ghosh demonstrates that science was reshaped in the Indian context. Chapter Two focuses on Ghosh's treatment of space in The Shadow Lines. Dramatized here is the notion that space is not simply a given, but is socially constructed and imagined. The novel suggests that the Western obsession with defining nations and firm boundaries on maps has reified a view of space as a territory to be owned, measured and divided. Chapter Three argues that in In an Antique Land, Ghosh turns his attention to prevailing perceptions of time. As well as exploring Ghosh's rewriting of conventional history, this chapter also considers the whole problem of representing the historical or ethnic Other. Ghosh rejects any single historical or anthropological account's claim to provide an authentic and complete version of the Other. He suggests that to provide a non-coercive description of alterity, the text should be multifaceted, imaginative, and open-ended. In Chapter Four, I return to Ghosh's discussion of scientific and technological discourse. The Calcutta Chromosome, I suggest, is another attempt at problematizing the boundaries between science and pseudoscience, and challenging the 'claim to know' (CC, 103) of Western scientists such as Ross. My argument concludes with a summary of the thesis's main concerns and a brief adumbration of the ways in which Ghosh's most recent novel, The Glass Palace, fits into Ghosh's argument about knowledge and power.

In this thesis, I make an in-depth study of the travel-related work of three authors: Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, and Arnitav Ghosh. They have all written travelogues, the importance of which - in terms of the centrality of the idea of travel to their identities and works - has been critically underestimated; my work is intended to redress this imbalance, and to assert the importance of the experiences and consequences of travel to the lives and authorships of these three authors. I explore the importance of travel through a focus on the concept of transnationalism in the work of all three - whether this transnationalism is textual, personal, or geopolitical, it provides a crucial lens through which to view the work of Ondaatje, Seth, and Ghosh. This dual focus on travel and transnationalism is reflected in the structure of the thesis. After a critical introduction, in which I map out the terrain of my argument and accept and reject certain key methodological terms, the work falls into three main, author-focused chapters. In each of these, I start with a biographical analysis of the author and his situation; this leads into an analysis of his principal work of travel writing (Ondaatje's Running in the Family, Seth's From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet, and Ghosh's In an Antique Land); and in the final section of each chapter I study an example of the author's transnationalliterature from the end of the twentieth century (respectively, Anil's Ghost, An Equal Music, and The Glass Palace).

This thesis explores the critical reception of Indian author Amitav Ghosh in the national contexts of India, the UK, the US, and Australia. It examines the reasons why this author's works have been evaluated somewhat differently or similarly by critics in four major countries. In order to explore the reasons behind different analyses of Ghosh’s most significant works, the thesis examines the socio-cultural, historical, and political setting of India and three Anglophone countries on the eve of British colonialism. To make the thesis more focused, four notable novels of Ghosh are selected that reflect the troubled legacy of colonial experience and the discourse of formerly colonised societies, people, and ideas. In these selected novels, reconstruction of identities, diaspora, exile, displacement, gender-based violence, and ecological devastations are more meticulously explained than in Ghosh's other novels. However, the factual data or evidence used in this thesis introduces several distinguished academic publishers, scholars, universities, literary journals, and book reviews based on four selected countries: India, the UK, the US, and Australia. The major emphasis I have given is on a selection of scholarly articles that have made analytical, in-depth, as well as clear analysis of Ghosh’s works, but some of the book reviews of Ghosh are also included in my research, published in the London Review of Books, The Times, New Statesman, The New York Times, and Transnational Literature. All the critics examined in this thesis from each nationality independently epitomise their national evaluation of Ghosh’s significant works. It is interesting to note that, analysing Ghosh’s reception in four national contexts, this thesis finds theoretical alignments of the ideas of nationalism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, and utopianism.

This doctoral dissertation focuses on Amitav Ghoshs Sea of Poppies (2008) to investigate, from a postcolonial perspective, the way in which the writer deconstructs gender in the nineteenth-century India. In Chapter I, I analyze men and women within the Indian familial space in the nineteenth century, demonstrating how both are subjected to the disempowering effects of traditional rituals (such as sati), structures of Brahminical morality and patriarchal violence. The main character pair Deeti and Kalua is an example of how the persons are sexually assaulted (rape) and then silenced by an oppressive system. Chapter II, I examine men and women within the British colonial space, indicating how they are effected by the opium cultivation in the Indian hinterland. The peripheral characters peasants, eurasian and convicts are highlighted to show how they are uprooted from homeland and forced to be taken across the seas by the colonial administration to work as indentured labour. In Chapter III, I investigate the gender roles ascribed to Indians by the British colonizers. The secondary character pair Nob Kissin and Taramony shows how Ghosh deconstructs gender with the use of Indian mythology and storytelling. In the conclusion, I point out how Indian mythology is retrieved as an instrument of resistance.
Esta tese de doutorado tem como objetivo investigar, sob a luz do questionamento póscolonial, como Amitav Ghosh em Sea of Poppies (2008) desconstrói a narrativa colonial sobre gênero na Índia colonial no século XIX. No Capítulo I, analiso homens e mulheres dentro do espaço familiar indiano, demonstrando como ambos estão sujeitos aos efeitos de desempoderamento dos rituais (como sati), da moralidade bramânica e da violência patriarcal. As personagens Deeti e Kalua exemplificam como os sujeitos, vítimas de violência sexual (estupro), são silenciados pelo sistema opressor. No Capítulo II, examino homens e mulheres dentro do espaço colonial britânico, indicando como os indivíduos são afetados pelo cultivo do ópio na Índia. As personagens periféricas camponeses, anglo-indianos e condenados servem de exemplo para destacar como essas pessoas são arrancadas de seu país e forçadas a migrar para as colônias inglesas. No Capítulo III, investigo como os ingleses inferiorizam os indianos. As personagens secundárias Nob Kissin e Taramony mostram como o conceito de gênero é desconstruído através da mitologia. Concluo argumentando que Amitav Ghosh faz uso da mitologia indiana como um instrumento de resistência.

Cette thèse s’intéresse aux romans d’Amitav Ghosh, auteur d’origine bengalie, écrivant en langue anglaise. Elle les met en regard autour des trois notions de voix, langue et langage. Une analyse croisée des romans selon ces trois axes, qui eux-mêmes se chevauchent, permet de définir une écriture du métissage, une écriture de l’entre-deux. Les notions s’articulent autour d’une problématique axée sur la parole et s’appuie sur la théorie bakhtinienne du roman comme espace dialogique. Dans un premier temps, le métissage pose la question de la parenté de l’écriture, et permet d’interroger l’intertextualité qui y est à l’œuvre. Le métissage est mélange et dispersion, et brouille l’origine. Le métissage, que l’on prendrait dans son acception génétique, fonctionne par ailleurs comme un tissage. Ce travail analyse le tressage narratif du texte et met en évidence l’influence de la tradition orale. Le texte se trame sur un métier qui tisse voix et points de vue. Polyphonie et hétéroglossie permettent d’illustrer les stratégies du mélange déployées par l’auteur. Les langues du texte ainsi mises en perspective permettent de définir le métissage comme stratégie de l’imprévisible. Les romans s’hybrident de langues étrangères et permettent de placer le romancier dans le questionnement du roman contemporain sur la traduction
Amitav Ghosh is a Bengali writing in English. This dissertation focuses on his novels from the standpoint of the three following notions: voice, language and speech. An interwoven analysis confronting the novels to these three notions which overlap allows us to define a writing of métissage, a writing of the in-between. Voice and language intersect, and prompts to ground the investigation of the text in a problematic revolving around speech, and based on Bakhtine’s theory of dialogism. First, métissage leads to question the parenthood of Ghosh’s writing and its intertextuality. Métissage means mixing and dispersal, and so, undermines the notion of origin. Then, the biological process of métissage parallels the act of weaving. This analysis shows how the narrative interweaves voices and points of view, and exposes its orality. Polyphony and heteroglossy are the backbones of the narrative. They illustrate the mixing strategies used by the writer. Such an approach of the languages he uses in his novels allows us to define métissage as a strategy of the unpredictable. The novels interweave foreign languages. This shows how Ghosh asserts his voice in the questioning of translation which characterizes the contemporary literary scene

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Este trabalho busca analisar as apropriações que o escritor indiano em língua inglesa Amitav Ghosh faz das noções ocidentais de ciência e religião em suas respectivas obras The Calcutta Chromosome e The Circle of Reason, por meio de diálogos, tensões e negociações destas noções com paradigmas filosófico-religiosos de caráter inclusivista e dialógico da civilização indiana, que são matrizes existenciais que perpassam gerações e influenciam inclusive a contemporaneidade da Índia. Para esse fim, esse trabalho privilegia a literatura ficcional como ferramenta crítica para as discussões sobre ciência e religião, uma vez que a ficção propicia a contextualização das coisas/seres, ou seja, a apreensão destes em sua totalidade. Com isso, também buscamos apresentar uma contextualização histórica, linguística, literária, científica e filosófico-religiosa para que sejam mais bem compreendidas algumas escolhas de Amitav Ghosh, a saber: a língua inglesa, o gênero literário romance, as temáticas da medicina tropical e da frenologia e a apropriação da doutrina da transmigração da alma (ātma), a lei do karma e a teoria dos guṇas, discutidas em fontes como os Upaniṣads e o Bhagavad-gītā. Como ferramentas de análise utilizamos, sobretudo, teorias pós-coloniais de subalternidade, tradições unitaristas da filosofia hindu, as obras não-ficcionais do próprio autor e as obras dos mais importantes críticos literários de Ghosh. Com as análises literárias mostramos que Ghosh, além de por em prática a tradição inclusivista indiana, ele demonstra a superioridade do ―domínio espiritual‖ sobre o ―domínio material‖, (conceitos cunhados por Partha Chatterjee) e reabilita a noção de uma racionalidade ocidental excludente tornando-a uma razão iluminadora e libertadora.
This study analyzes the appropriations of Western notions of science and religion by the Indian writer in English Amitav Ghosh, in his respective works The Calcutta Chromosome and The Circle of Reason, through dialogues, tensions, and negotiations between these notions and religious and philosophical paradigms of the Indian civilization, characterized by its inclusive and dialogical characteristics. These paradigms form an existential matrix that crosses generations and even influences contemporary India. To this end, this work focuses on fictional literature as a critical tool for the discussion on science and religion, since fiction provides contextualization for things/beings, that is, the comprehention of these in their entirety. With this, we also seek to provide a historical, linguistic, literary, scientific, philosophical and religious context in order to better understand some of Amitav Ghosh‘s choices, namely the English language, the novel as literary genre, the themes of tropical medicine and phrenology and the appropriation of the doctrine of transmigration of the soul (saṃsāra), the law of karma and the theory of guṇas discussed in sources such as the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad-gītā. As tools of analysis, we use especially postcolonial theories of subalternity, unitarian traditions of Hindu philosophy, nonfictional works of the author himself and the works of the most important literary critics of Ghosh‘s work. With literary analysis we show that Ghosh, besides using the inclusivist Indian tradition, demonstrates the superiority of ―spiritual domain‖ over the ―material domain‖ (concepts coined by Partha Chatterjee) and also rehabilitates the notion of an exclusionary Western rationality transforming it into an enlightening and liberating reason.

This thesis undertakes a critical study of ethics in the postcolonial novel. Focusing on four authors, namely Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Caryl Phillips, and Kazuo Ishiguro, I conduct a comparative analysis of the ethical engagement offered in a selection of their novels. I argue that the recognitions and related emotional responses of characters are integral to the unfolding of these novels’ ethical concerns. The ethics thus explored are often marked by the complexity and impurity characteristic of the tragic – an impurity which is productively thought together with Jacques Derrida’s understanding of “radical evil”. I arrive at this through deploying an approach to ethics in the postcolonial novel that is largely drawn from the work of Martha Nussbaum, David Scott, and Terence Cave. This approach is attentive to both the particular contexts in which the novels’ ethical concerns unfold, as well as the general ethical questions in relation to which these can be understood. Crucial to this is the concept of anagnorisis, that is, the recognition scene. Functioning as both a structural and a thematic element, it serves as a hinge between the general and the specific ethical considerations in a novel. There are three ethical themes that I consider across the thesis: the ethics of remembrance, the human, and religion. The works of these four authors cluster around these concerns to differing degrees and with differing perspectives. What emerges is that while each engagement is focused on the particular details that the novel represents, the range of perspectives can nevertheless be productively read alongside one another as interventions into these general concerns. Following from this I also conclude that as a suitable, if not privileged, form in which to engage questions of the ethical, the postcolonial novel hosts the ethical difficulty that I name as the tragic, and which is characterised by the term radical evil.

This thesis attempts to reformulate the concept of hope represented in, and inflected by, the Indian English novel. This comparative literary study focuses primarily on Amitav Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry, whose novels offer myriad examples and resultant effects of a reflexive hope. I argue in light of their work to refigure hope in its varied and multiple articulations: positive and negative, for-life and for-death, dependency, waiting, nostalgia, narcissism. All of these, I suggest, manifest in a nominal-messianic hope that formulates a powerful critique of global capital most advantageously constellated in these Indian English novels. I arrive at this from the early writings of Jawaharlal Nehru and his unshakable belief in socialist progress that informs the productive tension within hope that inform the readings of Ghosh’s and Mistry’s novels. Concomitant to this thesis on hope is the recalibration of definitions of poverty to the principles of capabilities that allow for the simultaneous discussion of how the state can shape social opportunities for its citizens. This, I argue, is necessary for the flourishing of more nuanced understanding of hope. Moving away from purely quantitative measurements of poverty to more qualitative capabilities pushes the novel to the foreground of these arguments. Just as Nehru explores his own formulations of hope and hopefulness through the poetry of Matthew Arnold, the Indian English novel, here, is best able to enunciate a reflexive hope that is central to the notion of capabilities. This is why poverty studies in India needs the Indian English novel.

Magister Artium - MA
One can think of an aesthetic as one’s artistic mode and purpose. The aesthetic is differently foregrounded in each of Ghosh’s three selected novels: in the first novel studied, aesthetic concerns are linked with beauty. Female beauty in particular, is the primary aesthetic focus in The Glass Palace since it is beauty that inspires love and appreciation. In the second novel, The Hungry Tide, the aesthetic explores techniques of writing that encompass environmental questions. This novel shows nature as its primary aesthetic since it is through the encounter with nature that its aesthetic is realised and an appreciation for all life forms are established.

Tracked and inscribed across the centuries by traders, pilgrims and imperial competitors, the Indian Ocean is written into literature in English by Joseph Conrad, and later by selected novelists from the region. As this thesis suggests, the Indian Ocean is imagined as a space of littoral interconnections, nomadic cosmopolitanisms, ancient networks of trade and contemporary networks of cooperation and crime. This thesis considers selected fiction written in English from or about the Indian Ocean—from the particular culture around its shores, and about the interconnections among its port cities. It focuses on Conrad, alongside Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Lindsey Collen, whose work in many ways captures the geographical scope of the Indian Ocean: India, East Africa and a mid-point, Mauritius. Conrad’s work is examined as a foundational text for writing of the space, while the later writers, in turn, proleptically suggest a rereading of Conrad’s oeuvre through an oceanic lens. Alongside their diverse interests and emphases, the authors considered in this thesis write the Indian Ocean as a space in and through which to represent and interrogate historical gaps, the ethics and aesthetics of heterogeneity, and alternative geographies. The Indian Ocean allows the authors to write with empire at a distance, to subvert Eurocentric narratives and to explore the space as paradigmatic of widely connected human relations. In turn, they provide a longer imaginative history and an alternative cognitive map to imposed imperial and national boundaries. The fiction in this way brings the Indian Ocean into being, not only its borders and networks, but also its vivid, sensuous, storied world. The authors considered invoke and evoke the Indian Ocean as a representational space—producing imaginative depth that feeds into and shapes wider cultural, including historical, figurations.

L’obiettivo di questa tesi è l’analisi della rappresentazione di Calcutta nelle opere di tre scrittori postcoloniali di origine bengalese, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh e Neel Mukherjee. Per questi autori, Calcutta è il luogo del radicamento artistico e culturale e, al tempo stesso, un punto da cui partire per osservare e percorrere il resto del mondo. Rispetto al passato, oggi la città bengalese ha perso rilevanza economica e politica. Tuttavia, Calcutta ha ancora un ruolo significativo dal punto di vista culturale. L’obiettivo di questo lavoro è dunque di affrontare lo spazio di Calcutta dal punto di vista culturale e letterario. Nello specifico, nelle pagine che seguono ci occuperemo di esaminare la rappresentazione spaziale di Calcutta; di dare conto della complessa interazione tra locale e globale; di restituire valore alla dimensione locale in un contesto postcoloniale; infine, di analizzare le forme e i modi della modernità bengalese, così come vengono affrontati dagli autori del corpus. La tesi è organizzata in quattro capitoli. Il primo esamina e riassume il contesto teorico alla base dell’analisi dei testi e prende in considerazione tre ambiti fondamentali: la geografia letteraria; la dialettica spaziale; gli studi sulla città coloniale, modernista e postcoloniale. I successivi capitoli di analisi procedono per temi spaziali via via più ampi. La discussione si apre con una disamina della casa, guardando in particolare alla dicotomia tra spazio privato e pubblico. Il capitolo successivo si interessa dello spazio urbano come teatro di alcune pratiche moderne: la flânerie, l’adda, la lotta politica. L’ultimo capitolo, infine, intende offrire una prospettiva più ampia, prendendo in considerazione la relazione di Calcutta con il resto del mondo.
This dissertation analyses the representation of Calcutta in the works of three postcolonial authors of Bengali origin, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, and Neel Mukherjee. For these writers, Calcutta is the place in which they are aesthetically and culturally rooted, and, at the same time, the place from which they look at the global world. Although it has less economic and political relevance compared to Bombay or Delhi, Calcutta is still extremely significant in defining Indian modernity, especially from a cultural point of view. Thus, this thesis will examine the space of Calcutta from a cultural and literary perspective. In particular, it will analyse the spatial representation of the city in relation to the complex interaction between the local and the global, with the aim of emphasising the value of the local in a postcolonial context. In addition, it will look at how the authors address the issue of Bengali modernity. The thesis consists of four chapters. The first examines and summarises the theoretical context at the basis of the rest of the analysis. It considers three main theoretical frameworks: literary geography; spatial dialects; studies on the colonial, modernist and postcolonial city. The following chapters revolve around specific spatial themes. The discussion opens with an analysis of the home, and of the opposition between private and public space. The next chapter deals with the urban space as the site of the practices of modernity: flânerie, adda, and various forms of political struggle. The last chapter takes on a wider perspective and considers the relationship of Calcutta with the rest of the world.

Cette thèse propose une lecture croisée des épopées traditionnelles et postcoloniales dans un cadre transculturel. Une analyse comparée de Moby Dick de Herman Melville, Omeros de Derek Walcott et la trilogie de l’Ibis d’Amitav Ghosh nous permet de cerner spécificités de l’épopée moderne postcoloniale. Celle-ci s’inscrit dans la lignée des épopées traditionnelles d’Homère, Virgile, Arioste, Camões et Milton, tout en rivalisant avec elles. Les épopées traditionnelles et modernes ont recours à des conventions qui esthétisent l’expérience collective comme les comparaisons épiques, la généalogie présentée sous forme de prophétie et la mise en abyme ekphrastique. L’épopée traditionnelle met en avant la vision d’une société unifiée grâce à des conjonctions harmonieuses entre le trope et la diégèse, des continuités généalogiques entre l’ancêtre et le descendant ainsi que des associations autoréflexives ekphrastiques entre l’histoire impériale et le texte qui la glorifie. Dans cette perspective, la spécificité de l’épopée postcoloniale semble résider dans l’articulation ambivalente de la condition postcoloniale. Ainsi, chez Melville, Walcott et Ghosh, le style héroï-comique contrebalance les comparaisons épiques opérant des transfigurations héroïques. De même, de nouvelles affiliations hybrides forgées par les personnages coexistent avec des généalogies discontinues, sans en combler toutes les lacunes créées par le déracinement et la violence coloniale. Cette vision équivoque trouve son expression la plus franche dans les séquences ekphrastiques où les textes sont confrontés au choix impossible entre commémoration de l’expérience et regard critique vis-à-vis d’elle
This thesis offers collocational readings of traditional and postcolonial epics in transcultural frameworks. It investigates the specificities of modern postcolonial epic through a comparative analysis of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. It explores how these works emulate, but also rival, the traditional epics of Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, Camões, and Milton. Both traditional and postcolonial epic rely on generic conventions in order to aestheticize collective experience, setting it against the natural world (via epic similes), against history and imperial destiny (via genealogy and prophecy), and against the epic work itself (via ekphrasis). However, traditional epic emphasizes a unified worldview, characterized by harmonious conjunctions between trope and diegesis, genealogical continuities between ancestor and descendant, and self-reflexive ekphrastic associations between imperial history and the epic text commissioned to glorify it. From this perspective, the specificity of postcolonial epic can be formulated in terms of its ambivalent articulation of the postcolonial condition. In the works of Melville, Walcott, and Ghosh, tropes of heroic transfiguration are held in check by the mock-heroic, while empowering self-adopted hybrid affiliations co-exist, but cannot entirely compensate for, discontinuous genealogies marked by displacement, deracination, and colonial violence. This ambivalence finds its most powerful expression in the ekphrastic sequences where the postcolonial texts are most directly confronted with the impossible choice between commemorating experience and being critical of such commemoration

Ecofeminism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as the result of the intersection of two critical perspectives, namely ecology and feminism. Therefore, it simultaneously serves as an environmental critique of feminism and as a feminist critique of environmentalism. The term was coined to designate a new social theory and a critical and political stance that challenges scientific views, gender relations, social institutions and the dominant economic doctrines, or, in other words, mankind’s role in the ecosphere, by asserting that all forms of oppression are connected and that structures of oppression must be addressed in their totality. The aim of this thesis is to analyze ecofeminism as a form of literary criticism and its relationship with postcolonialism. In order to do so, it will start by providing a general overview of the ecofeminist movement, focusing particularly on its theoretical origins, its history and importance and role as a literary approach. Thereafter, this work will focus on the links between the current ecological crisis, colonialism and the oppression of women through a close reading and analysis of Vandana Shiva’s acclaimed book Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. Finally, it will provide an ecofeminist postcolonial reading of two renowned and awarded novels by contemporary Indian-born authors, namely Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. The latter will be analysed with a particular view at investigating whether it is possible to approach a literary text by a male author from an ecofeminist perspective.

Thesis (MA)-- Stellenbosch University, 2014.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis ondersoek die verhouding tussen die verlede en die hede soos uitgebeeld in Jamal Mahjoub se The Carrier (1998) en Amitav Ghosh se In an Antique Land (1992). Hierdie tekste herverbeel die geskiedenis met die doel om 'n ander toekoms te dink. Hulle vertel alternatiewe geskiedenisse en lewer sodoende kritiek op die Westerse historiografie en die uitbeelding van die Ooste en die Suide daarin. Hierdie tesis sal uit Edward Said se Orientalism (1978) put as 'n manier om die dominante Westerse houdings teenoor die Ooste sowel as die Suide, verteenwoordig deur Afrika, te konseptualiseer soos die liminale karakters in Mahjoub en Ghosh se tekste oor die Indiese Oseaan- en Mediterreense wêrelde beweeg. Beide Mahjoub en Ghosh versplinter hulle verhale in 'n historiese en 'n kontemporêre draad, en verweef hierdie fragmente om sodoende kommentaar te lewer op die dinamiese verhouding tussen die verlede en die hede. Hierdie verhouding sal gekonseptualiseer word deur te put uit Walter Benjamin se konsep van 'n konstellasie verbindingspunte in tyd. Die kartering van verbindings word moontlik gemaak deur die skrywer se verkenning van 'n geskiedenis van verbindings tussen diverse mense in hierdie gebiede. Die alternatiewe geskiedenisse wat hier voorgestel word, onthul pre-koloniale Mediterreense en Indiese Oseaan-handelsnetwerke gebou op uitruiling, wat gelei het tot kosmopolitiese samelewings waarin die klem op verbindings eerder as geopolitiese binêre geval het. Gesprekke tussen verskillende kulture, gelowe en denkskole dryf hierdie verbindings in die historiese verhaallyne. Deur hierdie vergange wêreld en 'n meer vyandige twintigste-eeuse wêreld naas mekaar te stel, wil Mahjoub en Ghosh bevraagteken of die herkonseptualisering van die verlede die herverbeelding van die hede en toekoms moontlik maak, in terme van hoe mense in staat is om oor verskilgrense heen met mekaar te verbind.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis interrogates the relationship between the past and the present, as represented in Jamal Mahjoub's The Carrier (1998) and Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land (1992). These texts re-imagine history in order to think a different future. They narrate alternative histories and in the process critique Western historiography and its representation of the East and South. This thesis will draw on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) as a way of conceptualising dominant Western attitudes towards the East, as well as the South, represented by Africa, as the liminal characters in Mahjoub and Ghosh's texts move across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean worlds. Mahjoub and Ghosh both fracture their narratives into a historical and a contemporary thread, interweaving these fragments in order to comment on the dynamic relationship between the past and the present. This relationship will be conceptualised drawing on Walter Benjamin's notion of a constellation connecting points in time. The mapping of connection is enabled by the authors’ exploration of a history of connection between diverse people in these regions. The alternative histories proposed reveal precolonial Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trading networks built on exchange, resulting in cosmopolitan societies emphasising connection rather than geopolitical binaries. Conversations across differences — of culture, religion, and schools of thought — drive these connections in the historical plotlines. By juxtaposing this past world with a more hostile twentieth century world, Mahjoub and Ghosh seek to question whether reconceptualising the past enables the re-imagining of the present and future, in terms of how people are able to connect across boundaries of difference.

This thesis explores the thematic desire to establish an ecological human bond with nature in four contemporary novels: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, and The Expedition to The Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenström. These authors share a concern with the influence that language has on human perception, and one of the most significant ways they attempt to connect with the natural world is through somehow escaping, or transcending, what they perceive to be the divisive tendencies of language. They all suggest that human perception is not steered entirely by a disembodied mind, which constructs reality through linguistic and cultural lenses, but is equally influenced by physical circumstances and embodied experiences. They explore the potential of corporeal reciprocity and empathy as that which enables understanding across cultural barriers, and a sense of ecologically intertwined kinship with nature. They all struggle to reconcile their awareness of the potential danger of relating to nature exclusively through language, with a desire to speak for the natural world in literature. I have examined whether they succeed in doing so, or whether they contradict their thematic suspicion of language with their literary medium. I have prioritised a close ecocritical reading of the novels and loosely situated the authors’ approach to nature and language within the broad theoretical frameworks of radical ecology, structuralism and poststructuralism. I suggest that these novels are best analysed in the context of an ecocritical mediation between poststructuralist conceptions of nature as inaccessible cultural construct, and the naïve conception of unmediated, pre-reflective interaction with the natural world. I draw especially on the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose insistence that perception is always both embodied and culturally mediated truly renders culture and nature irreducible, intertwined categories. By challenging historical dualisms like mind/body and culture/nature, the selected novels suggest a more fluid and discursive understanding of the perceived conflict between language and nature, whilst problematizing the perception of language as merely a cultural artefact. Moreover, they are examples of the kind of literature that has the potential to positively influence our human conception of nature, and adapt us better to our ecological context on a planet struggling for survival.

This thesis is an attempt to grapple with the meaning of home and belonging, nation and identity, from the perspective of diaspora narratives. Recent theories of diaspora have produced profound epistemological shifts in the theoretical frameworks and modes of analysis informing intellectual and cultural production. It is within the context of these rearticulated notions of diaspora that I locate my own theoretical perspective in this thesis. My particular objective is to foreground the productive tensions of diaspora which can challenge the reductive processes of homogenization at work in the formation and consolidation of national and cultural identities. What lends particular urgency to my project is the frequency, and violence, with which 'Third World' ideologies of authenticity and cultural hegemony are now being articulated through the rhetoric of nationalism. To this end, I will examine and analyse representations of national and cultural identity in a selection of literary texts by writers of the Indian diaspora. Positioned at the 'in-between' spaces of nations and identities, the product of several interconnecting histories and cultures, writers in diaspora, such as Bharati Mukherjee, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry reject all appeals to an originary narrative of cultural identity in their attempt to dismantle and reconfigure the dominant narrative of the nation/state. In these texts, home and nation are renarrated, not in terms of a monolithic space, but as a historically constituted terrain, changing and contested, and cultural and national identity as a narrative-in- struggle, and therefore also always 'in process'. For all four novelists under study, diaspora exposes deep fissures in the imagined unity of the nation.

In this thesis I explore the place of the human in the Anthropocene, and our relationship to the Earth through an analysis of N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy. As the trilogy depicts an apocalyptic landscape where the Earth has sentience and humanity is divided into three subspecies, this work of speculative fiction lends itself well to be interrogated and examined as an allegory for our current climate crisis. The analysis is anchored in posthumanism and employs a variety of concepts, such as Bruno Latour’s work on agency and deanimation, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, and Amitav Ghosh’s work on speculative fiction among others. I argue that The Broken Earth trilogy illustrates that the Earth is an agentive network that can no longer be ignored and contend that the trilogy complicates both anthropocentrism and individualism by depicting amplified versions of human beings, and in doing so highlights the arbitrary boundaries between both nature and society, and human and nonhuman. Thus, The Broken Earth trilogy can be read as a warning call for a future to be avoided at all costs, while concurrently be used to make sense of the incomprehensibility of our contemporary era.

碩士
淡江大學
英文學系碩士班
104
This thesis takes Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide as the text to develop the postcolonial concept by the setting of characters and plots. Structurally, this thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter One introduces the traces of history. In this chapter, I use Benjamin’s “historical materialism”to flesh out the meanings of history with a particular emphasis on his seminal essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Chapter Two, I regard “translating history” as my focal point. For me, translating history refers to everyone’s own stand because each part of memory will be saved by people with different emotions, status, or ages and so on. Different ways to look at the same thing will construct distinct outcomes and perspectives ultimately. In The Hungry Tide, Kanai has managed to link the content of the diary to his past image of Uncle Nirmal and Kusum while he was reading Nirmal’s diary in order to understand Nirmal’s mental state at that time. From reading, Kanai will have his own attitude toward events written down in the diary. If it wasn’t read by Kanai, readers would read another version of the story probably. The translation of facts is extremely important here. On the other hand, the interpretation of historical facts can retrieve the flaw of faded memory. In Chapter Three, I look into the relationship between history and its afterlife. This chapter is rooted in Benjamin’s conception of redemption. Why do we need to emphasize the significance of parts omitted by historians? The answer is redemption. No matter whether Ghosh’s view or Benjamin’s argument, both of them show one idea: history will shoulder the task of redemption which is a way to see history in the past and to connect to its future. In conclusion, the chief discourse of this paper is to propose in The Hungry Tide the historical dilemmas and conflicts mentioned by Ghosh in Benjamin’s approach. Instead of the methodology of dichotomies, I argue that the power of redemption highlights the refusal of cultural differences in historical performance and the citation of fragmented history. The completeness of history should be stemmed from its incomplete parts. Incompleteness also has the oppressed hold the position of voicing within history in order to prove its historical situation in the flood of history in which the oppressed plays a key role.

Drawing on recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the sense of place, this dissertation examines how the literary landscapes of formerly colonized countries embody colonial and post-colonial history. The project focuses on the ways in which specific material places both preserve and trigger memories, especially memories relevant to the colonial and postcolonial history of these places, and how the conjunction of place and the past leads us to “bump into” social memories often dismissed from formal histories. The “rememory” that one encounters in a particular place recuperates the territorial significance of formerly colonized countries in a deterritorialized world. In this sense, landscapes serve as material palimpsests of colonial and postcolonial history. To discuss the recovery of memories etched on landscapes, this dissertation investigates works by three postcolonial writers: Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) and Playing in the Light (2006), and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005). Employing their liminal location as diasporic writers to examine the colonial and post-colonial history of their home countries, these writers recuperate the memories of the marginalized that are not visible in the official archives of those countries. Set on a fictional Caribbean island, Marshall’s work unburies the history of resistance to colonial governance, a history neither glorified nor written about in formal history. Narrating the story of a “white” woman who discovers that she is actually of mixed-race descent, Wicomb’s Playing in the Light reveals the past of racial passing buried in the urban landscapes of post-apartheid Cape Town. Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide unfolds the dismissed history of the Indian Partition on the border of India and Bangladesh, awakening memories of refugees marginalized because of their class, religion and ethnicity. Disclosing memories of the past, Marshall, Wicomb, and Ghosh demonstrate how inextricably entangled the past colonial conflicts of the homelands are with their present post- or neo- colonial socio-political issues. Drawing on memories bound to places, Marshall, Wicomb and Ghosh recover the specificity and diversity of postcolonial history and place, challenging the neoliberal and neocolonial promise of a border-free world market and the postmodern illusion of multi-national or non-territorial world citizens.

Abstract Versione italiana Nell'ambito della produzione letteraria del romanziere indiano Amitav Ghosh, gli ultimi due romanzi (Mare di papaveri e Il fiume dell'oppio) rappresentano un esempio di summa literaria che unisce le due anime di scrittore e di storiografo di questo autore. I due romanzi, facenti parte dell'annunciata Trilogia dell'Ibis, raccolgono e portano a compimento la poetica di questo autore che vede la scrittura della fiction come complemento necessario alla storiografia, in una visione interdisciplinare della conoscenza del passato e della scrittura della storia. Del resto il Ghosh romanziere si è contraddistinto sin dai suoi esordi come uno scrittore particolarmente attento alla ricerca e all'analisi delle fonti storiche che sono alla base dei suoi romanzi. L'interesse per la storia, inoltre, costituisce uno dei topic principali della narrativa indiana contemporanea, e si lega da una parte alla critica del pensiero storico eurocentrico in rapporto alla particolare realtà indiana, dall'altra alla tematica della lingua come metastoria, simbolo e veicolo di una particolare visione del mondo che naturalmente influenza anche il racconto del passato. La discussione accademica del rapporto tra scrittura della storia e scrittura letteraria ha subito una svolta fondamentale a partire dai lavori di Hayden White e di alcuni filosofi come Jacques Derrida e Paul Ricoeur, che hanno sottolineato da una parte la natura provvisoria e soggettiva della pratica storiografica, dall'altra la centralità dell'elemento narrativo in questo tipo di scrittura, distanziando quindi la storia come disciplina dall'oggettività tipica della scienza, e paragonandola invece a una pratica di mappatura dei rapporti e degli incroci tra il reale e l’immaginario. A partire da questi presupposti, viene indagata dapprima la definizione, nella produzione letteraria di Ghosh, di un tipo di scrittura ibrida, a metà tra storiografia e fiction, qui denominata fictional history. Le caratteristiche fondamentali di questa poetica vengono identificate in alcune strategie di scrittura e indagine, nella fattispecie: la critica della centralità del concetto di stato-nazione, come metafora pervasiva utilizzata dalla scienza occidentale, la cui decostruzione diventa per Ghosh occasione per proporre concetti alternativi di appartenenza culturale, nonché per formulare una nuova definizione di umanismo alla luce dell'esperienza della postmodernità; l'introduzione dell'individuo e dell'esperienza individuale, in particolare di quella delle classi subalterne, come centro focale della storia; l'utilizzo della facoltà della imagination with precision come strumento principe per una scrittura immaginativa della storia. Successivamente vengono presi in esame i due romanzi attualmente pubblicati della Trilogia dell'Ibis. Dall'analisi di Mare di papaveri emerge la necessità di focalizzare l'attenzione sull'individualità dei personaggi, tratteggiati nel romanzo sia come esempi di irriducibile differenza culturale, sia come figure simboliche di una umanità plurale che sfida i confini canonici tra le culture e introduce la necessità di pensare l'esperienza umana come movimento e negoziazione. In River of Smoke, invece, si prende in esame principalmente la critica della forma del romanzo storico moderno, sulla cui tradizione si innesta la scrittura di Ghosh, rinnovandola e decostruendone ´dall'interno` le categorie essenziali, per arrivare a proporre un nuovo tipo di romanzo storico della postmodernità. Per entrambi i romanzi, inoltre, viene sottolineata l'importanza della sperimentazione e della ricerca linguistica nella scrittura di questo autore, che ancora una volta attua una decostruzione interna della forma della lingua inglese alla luce dell'esperienza della colonizzazione e della globalizzazione. Una piccola appendice, infine, è dedicata al commento del blog di Amitav Ghosh, visto come una sorta di archivio digitale che ´apre` la forma normalmente chiusa del romanzo e ancora una volta propone una visione della scrittura letteraria come una pratica ´oltre i confini` delle forme, dei generi e delle discipline.
Abstract English Version Among the literary production of the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, the latest novels (Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke) constitute a sort of summa literaria that brings together this author's two souls: that of the writer and that of the historiographer. The novels, part of the announced Ibis Trilogy, collect and develop this author's thought, which sees fiction-writing as a necessary complement to historiography, within an interdisciplinary vision of the knowledge of the past and of history-writing. Ghosh, as a novelist, has proved to be particularly concerned about the practice of research and about the analysis of the historical sources. Moreover, the concern about history is one of the principal topics of the contemporary Indian fiction. On the one hand, it is related to the critique of the eurocentric historical thought, especially with regard to the Indian experience; on the other hand, it is bound to the topic of language as metahistory, since language is seen as a symbol of a particular Weltanschaaung which obviously influences the writing of the past. The academic debate on the relationships between historiography and fiction writing has been subjected to an unprecedented revolution ever since Hayden White's works and the theories of a series of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur. On the one hand, these works have highlighted the provisional and subjective character of the historiographical practice; on the other hand, they have brought to the forefront the centrality of the narrative element in this kind of writing. By doing so, they have distanced history as a discipline from the typical objectivity of science, defining it as a practice whose task is to map the relationships between the real and the imaginary. Given these premises, the analysis focuses first on Ghosh's literary production in general, tracing the emergence of a kind of hybrid writing, in-between historiography and fiction, which goes under the name of ´fictional history`. The essential characteristics of this aesthetics are a series of ´strategies`; the first one is the critique of the concept of the nation-state, a pervasive metaphor used by the Western science, whose deconstruction serves Ghosh as a means to propose alternative definitions of cultural belonging, and to formulate a new kind of humanism of the postmodern era. Second, Ghosh chooses the individual and the individual experience, the subalterns' one in particular, as the core of history; third, he introduces the use of imagination with precision as the essential tool for an imaginative writing of history. The second part of the analysis regards the two already published novels of the Ibis Trilogy. The analysis of Sea of Poppies focuses on the individuality of the characters, described in the novel both as examples of an inescapable cultural difference, and as symbols of a plural humanity which challenges the canonical borders between cultures, introducing a view of the human experience as a process of movement and negotiation. In River of Smoke, the analysis focuses essentially on the critique of the form of the modern historical novel; Ghosh starts from this tradition and reinvents it, deconstructing its essential categories, in order to propose a new type of historical novel of postmodernity. In both novels, moreover, the importance of the linguistic research is highlighted as a central feature of this author's production; once again, Ghosh deconstructs the form of the English language from within, in the light of the experiences of colonization and globalization. Finally, a short outlook analyses Amitav Ghosh's blog, which is interpreted as a sort of digital archive that ´opens up` the normally ´closed` form of the novel and, once again, proposes a vision of fiction-writing as a practice ´beyond the borders` of forms, genres and disciplines.