In the Wake of Asbestos: Ship-building and Ship-breaking in Ross Raisin's Waterline and Tahmima Anam's The Bones of Grace

Arthur Rose

doi:10.1353/ari.2018.0032

Abstract

Variations in work conditions, and their consequences for social fragility and health precarity, become particularly evident when comparing industries that cross parallel postcolonial economies. This article pairs the ship-building and ship-breaking industries to bridge a pseudo-divide between the Global North and the Global South. It brings together two cultural works—Ross Raisin’s Waterline (2011) and Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace (2016)—that share a preoccupation with the consequences of either ship-building or ship-breaking, but which do not consider how these activities might produce different latent morbidities. Preoccupied with the immediate health concerns of their own histories, whether Glasgow’s ship-building or Chittagong’s ship-breaking industries, these texts pay scant attention to shared histories that intersect across this divide. Reading the novels together, on the basis of the conceit, demonstrates how each might supplement the other in attending to the health experiences of workers in ship construction and destruction. This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (grant no. 103339) as part of its project, ‘Life of Breath: Breathing in Cultural, Clinical and Lived Experience’.

Highlights

This article interprets Ross Raisin’s Waterline and Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace and their invocation of Glasgow’s ship-building and Chittagong’s ship-breaking industries, respectively
In an essay that emphasises the potential for diverse literary texts to elucidate different aspects of a single postcolonial political economy, the late Anthony Carrigan turns to two heterogeneous works “to link cruise tourism’s environmental interventions to colonial histories and concepts of agency” (143)
I adapt Carrigan’s conceit—the shared spaces of cruise tourism—to deliver a temporal conceit, considering the history of these cruise ships as a life-cycle that ties together workers involved in their construction and destruction but who are otherwise geographically separate

Summary

Introduction

This article interprets Ross Raisin’s Waterline and Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace and their invocation of Glasgow’s ship-building and Chittagong’s ship-breaking industries, respectively. Anam’s decision not to include asbestos in The Bones of Grace seems like a failure to attend to the virtual futures of the ship-breakers, in which their present inhalation of asbestos may have disastrous consequences.

Results

Conclusion