Chasing a Moving Target: Environmental Justice in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

초록

In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) are the stories of humans and animals, who suffer the consequences of British colonialism, state violence, and even well-intentioned conservationist movements. Especially prominent is the story of the indigenous population of humans and tigers in the islands of the Sundarbans, whose well-being is pit against one another so that justice for humans leads to a neglect of tigers, and likewise, justice for tigers leads to a dismissal of humans. Against this dichotomized politics, I argue that Ghosh aims to be just to both by delivering a justice narrative, for which Ghosh writes in a form that I will argue resembles a chase after a moving target, because justice in the Sundarbans is a highly mobile notion that necessitates a storytelling that traverses the local, the national, and the global, and involves multigenerational histories and multispecies relations. Demonstrating how this chase after justice and just storytelling result in a form that is dynamic, intersecting, and multifocal, I suggest that the arc of the narrative in The Hungry Tide delineates a movement toward totality, wherein humans, animals, and the environment form ever-expanding relationships of interdependence and conflict.

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