Pramod K. Nayar. “The Postcolonial Uncanny: The Politics of Dispossession in Amitav Ghosh’s the Hungry Tide.” College Literature, vol. 37, no. 4, 2010, pp. 88–119, https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2010.0011. Accessed 14 Nov. 2019.

This article examines the boundaries of the homely and unhomely in the context of the postcolonial within Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. He uses some psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory to argue that ways of knowing within the novel precede mere knowledge. The use in my project will be in terms of further exploring of his idea of “the indigenous canny”, and how it formulates a less problematic way of knowing.

Ratté , Lou . “Unlikely Encounters:Fiction and Scientific Discourse in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh.” History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction, edited by Chitra Sankaran, State University of New York Press, 2012, pp. 17–32, www.jstor.org/stable/jj.18254311. Accessed 14 Nov. 2024.

Lou Ratte seeks to do something similar within his text that I will attempt in mine, namely examining the way certain scientific discourse in The Hungry Tide. He hits on three main points:the ways indigenous knowledge is are stolen to bolster Western science,the ways science affects local populations, and the undermining of native science models. Ultimately, although this text is historicizing, I mean to use it primarily to examine the way scientific discourses in postcoloniality.

White, Laura A. “Novel Vision: Seeing the Sunderbans through Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Hungry Tide.’” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 20, no. 3, 2013, pp. 513–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44087261 . Accessed 14 Nov. 2024.

White’s article contends that the ways of knowing ,in a postcolonial context, are not about cold reason or dry empiricism but come phenomenologically. She is in conversation with another theorist we will also encounter in my essay, Walter Mignolo. She uses his concept of visual practices being another type of epistemology, rather than a perhaps a traditional philosophical dichotomy of “seeing vs knowing” . This will be one of my main pieces to think with as it gets to the heart of what I seek to argue; namely that are ways of knowing outside of Western models of postcoloniality. 

Alcoff, Linda Martín . “Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 7, no. 3, 2008, pp. 79–101, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.0.0008 .

Hunter College’s  very own Linda Alcoff details here a comprehensive overview of Walter Mignolo’s decolonial epistemology alongside explorations of Foucault. She relates power systems and the way knowledge gets imposed through discourse, specifically under postcolonialism. This will be the main theoretical piece I will work with. Alcoff is a philosopher and Mignolo is a semiotician/philosopher so the interdisciplinary nature of this  piece fits perfectly for the research project, which explores philosophy and literature, as means to discuss epistemology. 

‌Wilburn, Heather. “An Introduction to Western Epistemology.” Open.library.okstate.edu, Tulsa Community College, 18 Jan. 2021, open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/an-introduction-to-western-epistemology/.

My project is written with other literary critics in mind of course and most critics have at least a vague notion of certain classic epistemological concepts in Western philosophy. Nonetheless, Heather Wilburn’s introductory article, gives a concise and brief summary of major figures with epistemology. From Descartes to Hume, she covers the foundation by which Modern Western epistemology and philosophy was founded on. 

Rohlf, Michael, “Immanuel Kant”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/kant/> 

I likewise wanted to provide a brief overview on Kant, as he is one of the biggest, if not the biggest Western philosopher ever. The article by Wilburn does not provide an adequate overview on Kant’s philosophy, so for the purposes on my research I will instead use this one.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Ghosh’s section , Fictions,  is where he gets most in depth about the problems of narrative and epistemology. Specifically he hones in on how knowing, seeing, and imaging are not necessarily different categories, but are essential to understanding  the impending climate crisis we face. He like White historicizes, but specifically discusses the geological history of Bangladesh, and critiques how we understand mass  ‘disasters’. Knowing and narrative are key themes in both The Great Derangement and The Hungry Tide, so it is in my article that I want to keep these two works as companion pieces that play off each other.

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Works Cited

Pramod K. Nayar. “The Postcolonial Uncanny: The Politics of Dispossession in Amitav Ghosh’s the Hungry Tide.” College Literature, vol. 37, no. 4, 2010, pp. 88–119, https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2010.0011. Accessed 14 Nov. 2019.

Ratté , Lou . “Unlikely Encounters:Fiction and Scientific Discourse in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh.” History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction, edited by Chitra Sankaran, State University of New York Press, 2012, pp. 17–32, www.jstor.org/stable/jj.18254311. Accessed 14 Nov. 2024.

White, Laura A. “Novel Vision: Seeing the Sunderbans through Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Hungry Tide.’” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 20, no. 3, 2013, pp. 513–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44087261. Accessed 14 Nov. 2024.

Alcoff, Linda Martín . “Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 7, no. 3, 2008, pp. 79–101, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.0.0008.

‌Wilburn, Heather. “An Introduction to Western Epistemology.” Open.library.okstate.edu, Tulsa Community College, 18 Jan. 2021, open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/an-introduction-to-western-epistemology/.

Amitav Ghosh. The Hungry Tide. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

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Living in modernity is taxing in every sense. The constant “day to day” living of work, home, sleep, and repeat, of time as simultaneously fleeting and abundant, can lead, as we see with the protagonist Lizzie in Jenny Offill’s novel, Weather, mental illness, and a detachment to the world in a sense. The novel is structured less like your traditional prose and more like a book of witty and clever jokes, in the same vein of something you’d find at the airport bookstore. Something quick, pithy, and briefly entertaining. Offill’s book, though, is anything but briefly entertaining. What is offered in the novel are semi-brief descriptions, ponderings, and anecdotes of the psychological toll that modernity places on somebody.

Who is Lizzie though? Lizzie is a middle-class, educated, college librarian living and, in some sense, maintaining her classicalist, turned coder husband Ben, and inquisitive son Eli. Ben, like many of the other academics in the book, has had to find other means, whether pertaining to their fields or not, to find work. Lizzie and all the people in her circle fit the white, metropolitan, NPR-listening Gen-X/older Millennial type. They run podcasts, take their kids to gifted schools, and enjoy creature comforts. This bourgeois world of comforts, activities, and distractions, which have come to define our “everdays,” is at every turn stagnant and detached. Take this revealing passage, where Lizzie says:

Henry and Catherine come over for dinner. She brings giant sunflowers and I try to find a vase to hold them. She seems unnerved by all the books. “Have you read all of these?” she asks me. Later, she starts a conversation based on the idea that we’re living in unprecedented times.

 

I can see Ben hesitate. He has a complicated relationship to modern things. On the one hand, he makes educational video games. On the other, he has a PhD in classics. Two bad years on the job market and then he quit and learned to code.

 

I decide to comment for him. I recount some half-baked story about Lucretius. This guy lived in the first century BCE but claimed that in his time there was too much bored rushing around. Terrible fears one minute! Apathy the next! Catherine looks at Henry and then at me. “I just meant politics,” she says. (Offill 37).

For context, this passage is the entirety of the scene; as one perhaps would perceive this as being part of a bigger scene, its entirety is an anecdote that analogizes Lucretius with Ben, but also everyone. In this one scene, the many sorts of contradictions and banalities with modernity and time are sort of on display. Firstly, her being a librarian, the inferably large mounds of books they have, and the “idea that we’re living in unprecedented times” point to the way modernity modulates between productivity, urgency, and leisure. This is later supplemented by the second part of the anecdote, the all too real work force experience of Ben. He studied for years in a very contemplative, critical field that is some parts leisure, some parts productivity, and perhaps little urgency into a field that is perhaps all productivity and all urgency. The final part of the anecdote uses the story of Lucretius to capture the precise modulation between dread and malaise, but the sort of ‘volta’ or punchline, if you will permit me, is Catherine’s own sort of apathetical dismissal of the analogy Lizzie was trying to make.

As if to say, “I was just referring to politics; it’s not that deep.” What we hear in this aphoristic anecdote is a display of the inability to historize, so key to the postmodern condition. ‘ So many books, yet so little time to read them. So much knowledge, all of it useless when all you really need to know is how to use Python. Lucretius, an important poet and philosopher, is just a relic of the past. The politics of today are just the politics of now. Nothing ever happens.’ Yet as we’ll see later in the novel as Lizzie starts to integrate this condition she finds herself in, things indeed are happening, slowly but surely.

In what ways does Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide critique Western notions of epistemology, specifically Enlightenment notions of empiricism ? In what ways does Forkir , represent a “postcolonial epistemology” and in what ways do other characters like Nirmal, Kainai, and Piya represent the opposite end ?

Ecocriticism and postcolonial theory, at initial view, don’t seem to necessarily intersect or interact. Ecocriticism concerns the “trees and plants,” and postcolonial concerns “the third ld.” Yet this initial impression is naive and reductive. We see this sort of opposition in the book itself, with the conservatory efforts of the state being in conflict with the settling of Dalits in the Sundarbans. The book points out, and as many critics have, that one cannot separate the two spheres. That is to say that if one is to be ecocritical or speak of the environment, of the “natural world,” one must engage with postcoloniality. Critic Brandon Jones states this accurately when he remarks

Mark McGurl writes that the Anthropocene as geological present “exacerbates and magnifies the dilemma of human agency, locating the blowback of the waste products of modernization on the blurry line between intention and accident” (383). What this means in the case of The Hungry Tide is that through the lens of geological deep time, one of the novel’s central conflicts becomes how consciously to reconcile modern colonialist responsibility for human violence and environmental exploitation in South Asia with the accidental consequences of stratigraphic encroachment and global climate change. (Jones 2018)

The novel presents seemingly accidental “hand of god” type climatological phenomena as not isolated happenings. The type of happenings that we in globalized society have all grown accustomed to, yet here this is not the case. The book in very a elegant and tragic way historizes these phenomena as being wrapped in the social and political lives of the Dalits. Hence, space in the novel is not empty or dead but carries with it in very postcolonial fashion significations towards the past and present. This can be seen throughout the novel, but especially in the ending, as Forkir’s presence in time is sprinkled throughout the Sundarbans as routes on a GPS.

Time and history play a role in novels likewise, in as much as they seem to always find their way into the lives of our characters. The book is driven in part by Kainai and Piya, who have conscious and unconscious reasons for taking part in this adventure. On the surface, it’s purely pragmatic. Piya is going there because it’s her job to study dolphins, and Kainai is going begrudgingly to retrieve something. Yet as the novel descends deeper into the history of our characters, we find not just personal revelations but historical ones. By the end of the novel, the sphere of the personal and political is disrupted. For instance, what seems to Kainai as the ramblings of an old socialist turns into a beautiful and tragic account of a seemingly forgotten history. It points to the way globalized, postcolonial societies intertwine temporalities and spaces to erase the consequences of colonialism.