Toxic grace? Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace and the pollution trade

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how Tahmima Anam’s 2016 novel The Bones of Grace responds to the notion of development as understood with reference to the transfer of pollution from rich to poor countries in an age of neo-liberal globalization. It argues that by bringing together the past experiences of environmental subalterns, their deplorable present, and macabre future, Anam constructs temporal relationality that resists the tendency of the western discourse on the pollution trade to naturalize the cumulative economic effects of neocolonial power in developing countries. While this discourse creates a singular reality around economic growth by carefully concealing the concomitant risks, Anam, by invoking different political, cultural, historical, and ecological associations, invests each aspect of reality with multiple meanings. She thus creates plural and complex realities around inequity, injustice, and poverty resulting from the pollution trade and enables the reader to see beyond mere economic growth brought about by such trade.