Fixity Amid Flux: Literary Fiction and Rural Dispossession

Abstract

Chapter 5 turns to serious or “literary” fiction from the Global South, through its examination of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) in conjunction with Zakes Mda’s Heart of Redness (2000). Unlike the popular fiction examined in earlier chapters, these novels by Ghosh and Mda consist of layered “network narratives” that oscillate between temporalities and points of view in their depictions of rural life in India and South Africa respectively. But although formally and intellectually complex, these narratives are nonetheless structured by the neoliberal script— which becomes especially clear in how they each track the moral transformation and entrepreneurial development of metropolitan characters, while framing rural peasants as fixed and idealized figures. In the end, Ghosh’s and Mda’s novels appear to be animated by a philosophical and aesthetic tension between networks and nostalgia, or between fluidity and fixity. This tension speaks to the problematic ways in which the novels mourn the losses that attend neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of rural ecologies.