‘Out of Place’? The Poetics of Space in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Michael Ondaatje’s

Abstract

Drawing on recent commentary on place and space by cultural geographers, this essay initially considers the extent to which the protagonists of Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost find themselves “out of place”. It develops this line of inquiry into a more general discussion of ways in which the novels’ topographies demonstrate the shifting unstable nature of place. Place, it argues, is the ever-changing product of interconnecting flows that have been accelerated by diasporic movement and globalization; and such a view provides the novels with a focus for a consideration of the claims of conflicting epistemologies in areas such as ecology, human rights and historiography, as well as geography.