A Sea of Violence and Love: Precarity, Eco-Fiction and the American Factor in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Abstract

This paper will interrogate a set of popular tropes and clichés that have become characteristic of the emerging genre of eco-fiction (eg. an impending threat such as an ecological disaster; endangered nature as a force in its own right which protects and threatens the human being; the uselessness of science and technology against the unleashed forces of nature) in a reading of Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide. I will examine the novel’s use of such tropes with hindsight, in the light of Ghosh’s 2016 non-fiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, where the author’s interest in ecology, global warming and the agency of fiction with respect to ensuing threats to human civilization becomes manifest. Using Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s concept of “green postcolonialism”, I will argue that the two books share a deep concern with the ways in which the relationship between nature and culture, which has changed dramatically in the recent decades, mirrors a change in the relationship between the “West” and the “East”. Thus, if colonialism functioned on the basis of an assumption of superiority with respect to non-European civilizations, it is now non-European forms of knowledge, formerly considered “primitive”, that prevail over Western knowledge when it comes to facing nature’s revolt against various kinds of prolonged human aggression.