Discard Ecologies and the ‘Hyposubject’ in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article posits the concept of excremental toxicity as a critical lens with which to explore the resistive and subversive ways in which pollution that is dumped onto precarious ecologies is reimagined in postcolonial writing beyond the norms of silencing that govern its distribution and police its visibility. Focusing on waste in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, I analyze the novel’s construction of alternative decolonial and anti-capitalist configurations, affordances, and imaginaries of toxicity – both as substance caught in a nexus of racialized, neocolonial and settler-colonial, and consumer capitalist structures, as well as a modality of materialization that arbitrates on what appears in public perception as a legitimate field of mattering and what is displaced to the unseeable margins. These alternative configurations tackle toxicity’s invisibilization through strategies of externalization that seek to materialize toxic politics in various eco-somatic ways by bringing corporeality, particularly disabled, impaired, pathological corporealities to the forefront of cultural inquiry. Methodologically situating itself at the intersection of medical humanities, waste, and toxicity studies and drawing on Morton and Boyer’s formulation of the “hyposubject,” this article examines literary configurations of medico-juridical pathologies in the context of ecological devastation and contemporary neoliberal resurgences of racial imaginaries and extractivist practices.