Cosmopolis, Civility, and the Practice of Heretical History in Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land

Abstract

My essay argues that Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land (1992) constitutes an aesthetico-political reflection on a form of citizenship in the world; a way of sharing and taking part in it through a mode of freedom and equality. Conjoining Étienne Balibar's concepts of civility and heresy to Jacques Rancière's formulation of the dissensual logic of fiction, I study the incongruous cosmopolitics of Ghosh's text. Analyzing its poetics and politics of knowledge, I argue for the capacity of fiction to etch heretical forms of subjectivation that diverge from what Balibar designates as the anthropology of the (modern) political subject.