Animality, Biopolitics, and Umwelt in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Animality, Biopolitics, and Umwelt in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Tsai explores Ghosh’s novel in relation to intersecting histories of both human and nonhuman violence. Set in the tide country of the Sundarbans in Bangladesh and India, the novel dramatizes vulnerable forms of life, including endangered river dolphins and dispossessed people, threatened not only by storms and floods stemming from global warming but also by the neo-imperialist violence of the state. Tsai’s reading of the novel draws upon the concept of the Umwelt from Jakob von Uexküll, as well as the fields of animality studies, biopolitics, systems theory, and phenomenology, in order to argue for what he calls a “critical bioregionalism” in which advocacy for vulnerable places needs to be attentive to the overlapping forms and histories of violence that connect human and nonhuman inhabitants.
Keywords: animality studies, biopolitics, Umwelt, Jakob von Uexküll, Amitav Ghosh, systems theory, phenomenology, “critical bioregionalism”, vulnerability
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