The Postcolonial Uncanny: The Politics of Dispossession in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

Abstract

The essay demonstrates how Amitav Ghosh's novel, The Hungry Tide , uses a spectropoetics, specifically of the uncanny, in order to foreground the condition of dispossession. The essay argues that the uncanny is more than simply a perceptual condition—it is a political context where refugees are made into ghostsin "unhomely" locations by dispossession. The uncanny is engendered through the consistent deployment of visual and sensory ambiguity and doubling, the shifting nature of the land itself, even as mythic and primitive narratives enter into the perceptual frames of the observer. The uncanny open space is the space of the politically dispossessed and one which requires a more intimate knowledge. Finally, the frightening uncanny is rendered safe through the "indigenous canny," of Fokir's ghost, where local knowledge incorporated into the observation and thinking makes the Sundarbans a home.