Spectacular Subjects: Abjection, Agency, and Embodiment in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

Abstract

Through the critical lens of Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, this essay analyzes representations of the body in Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People, arguing that such representations encode the author’s conceptions of and responses to the marginalization of environmental justice communities in modern India and the Global South. Reading Sinha’s depictions of the bodies of disaster victims and their allies, I contend Sinha mobilizes the abject as an oppositional mode that offers a possible ground of resistance to neo-colonial configurations of power, configurations produced in part by the pervasive and increasing encroachment of multinational corporations on national sovereignty and individual rights. I also maintain that the bodies of the victims do not tell the whole story of Sinha’s complex response to the plight of these communities. Rather, Sinha also articulates important connections between bodily materiality, corporate personhood, and corporate guilt. Ultimately, I argue, Sinha’s effort to seek redress for environmental justice communities involves the reintroduction of the bodies of victim and perpetrator into narrative in order to foreground the body as a crucial rhetorical element in a contest between marginalized people and the gargantuan powers that oppose and oppress them.