Abstract

My title brings together three key components for this study: resilience, cosmopolitanism, and challenge-response. The designation of the texts considered here—Patricia Grace's Potiki, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, and Indra Sinha's Animal's People—as challenge-response novels is loosely based on Arnold Toynbee's theory of the rise and fall of civilizations. I revise his concept, however, by focusing on the orientation that he took regarding the minorities within a society, which leads to a focus on microsocial units of local communities, whose actions Toynbee envisioned as being the key factor in whether a society would evolve into a civilization, collapse, or decay: A society, we may say, is confronted in the course of its life by a succession of problems which each member has to solve for itself as best it may. The presentation of each problem is a challenge. 1

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