Gramsci, Antonio. “The Formation of the Intellectuals” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism , W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. , New York, NY, 2018, pp. 929–935. 

Gramsci introduces a theory about knowledge, and its connection with hegemony. He categorizes branches of “organic” intellectuals as people who maintain hegemony and speak to certain groups with a certain affinity, and “traditional” intellectuals who represent a mystical, transcendent type of knowledge. Though the boundary between the two seems clear, given the shifting landscape of The Hungry Tide,the importance of the role characters like Fokir might play in The Hungry Tide as opposed to someone like Piya or Kanai might change based on location and purpose. Gramsci’s guidelines of what constitutes hegemony and who is in power of forming one contradict the “lowly” status of Fokir, and may serve as a message about ethical post colonial reformation when applied to The Hungry Tide. 

Jaising, Shakti. “Fixity amid flux: Aesthetics and environmentalism in Amitav Ghosh’s The hungry tide.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 46, no. 4, Oct. 2015, pp. 63–88, https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2015.0028. 

Shakti makes the claim that Ghosh reframes political activism in The Hungry Tide where Fokir functions as a mechanism for creating some third space of “post colonial identity” to help Kanai and Piya reconnect between concepts of canny/uncanny Sundarbans. Seeing Fokir as serving this purpose puts him in a discussion of glorification of peasant culture, inviting readers as well as other characters to feel sympathetic to the struggles of the indigenous–loss of land, identity, and poverty. I will argue that this is the kind of attention that takes away from the agency of Fokir as a more important character, providing a better means to promote post colonial activism, that comes from a place of wanting to understand, and not from a privileged place of feeling sorry for them.

Murphy, Patrick D. “Community resilience and the cosmopolitan role in the environmental challenge-response novels of Ghosh, Grace, and Sinha.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, 1 Feb. 2013, pp. 148–168, https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.50.1.0148. 

Murphy discusses what constitutes as successful “change” and who can be an organizer of such change. For him, it is minority communities as illustrated by Ghosh in the Marichjhapi refugees. Indigenous groups have the level of creativity and understanding of their world that best equips them with knowledge to adapt to the challenges they face. Adaptation and the way we adapt is more useful than the conservation of a social order, as that may become outdated and too rigid to serve as a place of hope anymore. In terms of The Hungry Tide, it will be interesting to examine the levels of adaptation, and how certain characters fall in and out of the habit of maintaining that social order they are used to, and the efficacy of these habits. 

Pirzadeh, Saba. “Persecution vs. protection: Examining the pernicious politics of environmental conservation in The Hungry Tide.” South Asian Review, vol. 36, no. 2, Nov. 2015, pp. 107–120, https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2015.11933020. 

This essay makes the claim that The Hungry Tide aims to address the issues that arise when foreign knowledge, in this case Western alienated intelligence, attempts to represent a culture like that of the Sundarban islands. One issue might be a “de-essentialized representation”, one where, what matters to the Westerner misses the importance of the same concept to the indigenous. It raises the question of what an objective truth even is. The Sundarban islands serve to emphasize constant change and mystique, which Pirzadeh argues is an intentional move by Ghosh to push against the Western idea that foreign places are, to our standards, “easily knowable”.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Can the Subaltern Speak.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism , W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. , New York, NY, 2018, pp. 2001–2012. 

Spivak discusses the ethical concerns in representing a group of people she calls, “subalterns”. Subalterns are not just marginalized individuals, but also an unrepresentable class who might be personally autonomous but politically and culturally are unable to be understood as such. Subalterns are a step further from a disadvantaged class, and as such she argues they “cannot speak” due to their constant misrepresentation. In my paper, this may represent Fokir, and the shortcomings of postcolonial subaltern studies to represent such a person would relate to the ways Piya attempts to “honor” Fokir by modifying all he stands for into a piece of GPS data.

Thieme, John. “‘Out of Place’? the Poetics of Space in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Michael Ondaatje’s.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 31, no. 2, 1 Apr. 2009, pp. 32–43, https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.8870. 

Thieme compares and contrasts two novels, The Hungry Tide and Anil’s Ghost, to emphasize the importance of space in the novels. I will focus only on the section about The Hungry Tide, which he uses to further argue that “places are the product of social relations” and the idea represented in Ghosh’s novel is that these social relations are always dynamic. The shifting nature of power or knowledge in the novel, is essential to understand the landscape of the Sundarbans, though I feel this argument is a little “chicken vs. egg” in nature. Ultimately, the argument is that places constitute their identity based on the ways different eyes see them, and this is relevant to The Hungry Tide as we examine what is important to which character, why, and how this relates to an ethical understanding and representation of an indigenous culture, while still being able to coherently express these ideas to the “outside”. 

Vincent, Suhasini. “An eco-critical analysis of climate change and the unthinkable in Amitav Ghosh’s fiction and non-fiction.” Humanities, vol. 7, no. 2, 7 June 2018, p. 59, https://doi.org/10.3390/h7020059. 

Suhasini succinctly examines the challenges that writers face when trying to account for the ecosystem of today. This essay serves as a “big-picture” piece, connecting literary theory and specific ideas about characters in the novel to ideas about the Anthropocene. He cites Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy to show how Ghosh wants to show how addressing ecological concerns cannot be done without examining the cultural attitudes that are necessarily involved in ecosystems. Nature and people are not remote from each other, and we cannot address things like climate change from a place where we feel we can cleanly draw lines between policy, culture, and nature.

Research Question: Through Fokir’s fate and relationships with other characters in The Hungry Tide, what does Ghosh imply about the importance of the subaltern, and to the extent to which they may be autonomous entities with the potential to ever be understood wholly by the “other”, and what implications would this (in)ability have in an environment as hostile as the Sundarbans–a setting also alluding to the world beyond the narrated India?

Bibliography:

Jaising, Shakti. “Fixity amid flux: Aesthetics and environmentalism in Amitav Ghosh’s The hungry tide.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 46, no. 4, Oct. 2015, pp. 63–88, https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2015.0028. 

Murphy, Patrick D. “Community resilience and the cosmopolitan role in the environmental challenge-response novels of Ghosh, grace, and Sinha.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, 1 Feb. 2013, pp. 148–168, https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.50.1.0148. 

Pirzadeh, Saba. “Persecution vs. protection: Examining the pernicious politics of environmental conservation in The Hungry Tide.” South Asian Review, vol. 36, no. 2, Nov. 2015, pp. 107–120, https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2015.11933020. 

Thieme, John. “‘out of place’? the poetics of space in Amitav Ghosh’s The hungry tide and Michael Ondaatje’s.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 31, no. 2, 1 Apr. 2009, pp. 32–43, https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.8870. 

Vincent, Suhasini. “An eco-critical analysis of climate change and the unthinkable in Amitav Ghosh’s fiction and non-fiction.” Humanities, vol. 7, no. 2, 7 June 2018, p. 59, https://doi.org/10.3390/h7020059.

Part 2 of Weather by Jenny Offill centers more heavily around ideas of politics, and it becomes clearer how we could make the claim that this is a cli fi novel, as we become more adjusted in Lizzie’s setting as well. This section begins to illustrate people’s political attitudes, and how that relates to climate. The narrator’s thought-like style makes this even easier to see, as we are subject to many experiences and inputs at once–much like the way we experience real life. For example, after short comments on “red, white, and blue popsicles” and voting, she says that people are getting “really sick of being lectured about the glaciers”, and that they’ve heard all about it–they just want to know “what’s going to happen to the American weather?” Lizzie compiles and glazes over these experiences, making it an effective cli-fi novel in its form, as it reflects what Haraway might call the daily anthropocene. It also depicts the worry over our waning attention spans as it relates to our ability to organize for a common cause or priority. We know that climate is a problem, that the city “will begin to experience dramatic, life altering temperatures by 2047”, but there is just so much else going on that snips away at our ability or even our desire to organize critically around these thoughts. For Lizzie, and many of us, this includes our jobs, schools, and relationships, and the same way that she bounces from one topic to the next, each getting just about the same screen time, we give the same amount of brain power to all sorts of random bits of information that we get throughout the day. Although this style of writing might be parallel to some real world, choppy, incoherent thinking, I feel it is still really interesting as a style in the way that it shows us we do not need much detail to get ourselves situated in a story. We have no idea what Henry looks like, we didn’t know who our narrator really was until the end of part 1, we don’t know what they like or don’t like, what they wear, or what their apartment looks like. Much of the time that “typical” novels devote to setting the scene is spent instead on jumping from one thought to the next, and we still can pick up the pieces and understand what is going on, to construct the perhaps irrelevant details ourselves. Maybe even this in itself is a comment on how what we think is important might not actually be necessary in order to effectively move in the world. In the same way we do not know what shoes Lizzie or Sylvia are wearing, it might not matter as much what we look like as what our principles are. We know they are concerned about the environment and are trying to make their points heard, we don’t know what they look like doing it. It reminds me of the discussion in the beginning of the semester regarding Nixon’s Slow Violence, and how technology and social media have created a world where everything is on the same level of importance to us: from morals to politics to our skincare routines. Maybe everything that is missing from Offill’s novel in terms of details is actually done on purpose as a comment on their unnecessariness. 

Another thing about part 2 plot wise is that we get to learn more about Lizzie. We see more clearly some marriage troubles she has, from critiques about her doing work around the house, to having a “real” job, and even annoyance at the amount of time she spends on the phone with her mother. We also see that, just as she avoids people from her son’s school, like Nicolla, they are also avoiding her. As her brother now has responsibilities in his own new family, it might be interesting to see if Lizzie reaches an increasingly isolative place in the novel, and what effect this might have on her thinking patterns. Especially since this section creates emphasis on the increasingly perilous state of the world, alluding to climate change and Trump’s first election, it would seem that it should be most helpful for Lizzie to alleviate her concerns, rather than brushing everything off as a joke. If this novel is meant to be a comment on the way we as a collective handle crises, I wonder what role the other characters are going to play, and if their role is strategic in some way, or merely supplementary to Lizzie. 

How does Amitav Ghosh critique theories of Western environmentalism in The Hungry Tide through the different roles Piya, Kanai, and Fokir play as productive characters in the narrated world clearly suffering from climate change?

In Jenny Offill’s Weather we are introduced to an almost passive yet observant main character. In many ways she is unlike a typical protagonist as she navigates through scenarios that kind of seem to happen to her, rather than her driving anything forward. However, her wit does not fail her, as she is obviously an intelligent person–at the very least very observant, which is evidenced by her reflections of the dinners and conferences she goes to with Sylvia. I think this passive attitude but awareness of the world is what makes Lizzie a good main character in a cli-fi novel, since she seems to reflect the attitude of many people today. We know about the climate disasters, of injustices, but we don’t really do anything about it–maybe because we feel stuck or not in control or have other things going on in our lives, just like Lizzie. For example, she notices at her first conference that there were “lots of people who were not Native Americans talking about Native Americans”; at another she reflects on the idea that when “older” generations die, there will be no unnerving feeling around technology because nothing will feel lost to the younger generations: “But wait, that sounds bad to me. Doesn’t that mean if we end up somewhere we don’t want to be, we can’t retrace our steps?” (24-26). Clearly, Lizzie sees the disconnect in speaking for cultural groups you aren’t part of, and worries about the future, but these thoughts are kept mainly to herself–they don’t speak some kind of movement, research, or anger in her. They just exist as the problems in the world. Similarly I think people today might feel this way about the things we are experiencing, where they are just things that exist and there isn’t much we can do about it, other than wait for doomsday. 

I think this lack of hope or lack of motivation to do anything is evident in another place in this novel, where Lizzie is talking about dreams. She gives an anecdote about how she had a dream she was in the supermarket, unable to find the switch to turn down the lights, “what happened to the flying dreams?” she asks (Offill 27). I think this is a nod to a concern Canavan also talked about, which is the societal loss of an ability to think of a future. The same way Lizzie has grown out of dreaming of flying (a common dream I am assuming)–or maybe depressed out of such whimsical thinking–we have also become too diluted to think up a plausible future for ourselves. We deal with the problems of the world as something happening TO us, and something we just have to live with, because there is no collective drive to envision a future where we adapt, are conscious about our autonomy or role as it relates to living along with nature, or “flying”. Instead, we look at the climate change clock in Union Square, take a deep breath out, immediately aware of all the history, paradoxes and injustices, and systems that got us here, and keep going along our day.