Graham Huggan Research Articles

Land and Legacy: Investigating Horizontal Conflicts in the Short Story "Dataran Melengen" through Postcolonial Ecocriticism Framework

The issue of ecology in former colonies is an inevitable consequence of past colonialism. The difference now is that the “colonial” subjects have transformed into multinational corporations that exploit nature and people by seizing the land on which communities depend for their livelihoods. This land grabbing is sanctioned by Indonesia through the legalization of laws that allow capitalism to flourish, while local communities become increasingly impoverished. This ecological issue is depicted in literature that critically addresses environmental issues. Therefore, this study examines the short story “Dataran Melengen” (2003) by Korrie Layun Rampan, which actively portrays the ecological issues in Kalimantan caused by companies holding Forest Concession Rights. This research actively employs postcolonial ecocriticism theory by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin as its formal framework and critically analyzes the text using Fairclough's critical discourse analysis method. This theory extensively discusses ecological issues in postcolonial countries, highlighting how state approval and abuse of power contribute to these issues. The study reveals ecological issues within the Dataran Melengen community, including horizontal conflicts driven by poverty, along with cultural loss, terror, and trauma. The short story “Dataran Melengen” serves two key functions as mentioned by Huggan and Tiffin: aesthetic and advocacy. These functions are expected to catalyze a third function—activism—where literature can drive social change. The research process involved a close reading of the text, contextual analysis, and a critical discourse approach to explore the interplay between narrative, power, and ecology.

Post-Colonial Ecocritical Dynamics in Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

The dynamics of ecological systems of the bioregion i.e., the Sundarbans of the Bay of Bengal dominates the novel 'The Hungry Tide' by Amitav Ghosh. Here, I analyze how the text destabilizes and subverts the Universalist claim of Western superiority based on false dichotomy between nature and culture by applying postcolonial eco-critical insights. The basic tenet of postcolonial ecocriticism is that social injustice is embedded in the injustice of nature and it sees equity in both by rejecting Universalist claims of Eurocentrism which sees nature and local communities as resources. To prove the claim, the researcher has gone through theoretical critical insight of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin who talk about postcolonial ecocriticism. Besides, the researcher also used the eco-critical insight as per the need of the paper. The qualitative interpretative research is based on the textual analysis of the primary text applying the postcolonial eco-critical insights. The paper concludes that social inequality and injustice in nature must be eradicated so as to liberate both.

Marketing secular anxieties: Mohsin Hamid’s planetary turn

ABSTRACT This article unpacks Mohsin Hamid’s position as a global novelist invested in translating the world view of Muslim characters for a secular, western audience. Its approach to Hamid’s secularism combines materialist with textualist frames of reference, seeing the circulation and reception of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Exit West (2017) as entangled with the novelist’s aesthetic strategies. The materialist approach, based on Graham Huggan’s and Sarah Brouillette’s work, questions how western audiences’ anxieties about religiously driven “Others” are marketed by the publishing industry, thus reinforcing the figure of the postcolonial author as a problematic interpreter of marginalized communities. The textualist approach argues that Hamid’s writing participates in the diffusion of global literature, and close reading will question how authors like him propose ways of reconsidering and rewriting hegemony through positioning themselves as “embedded with the world”, and by forging geocentred fictions which, paradoxically, trace lines of flight from the global marketplace.

Editor’s Note

ISLE 30.1 opens with the theme of the blue humanities in the article “Noise on the Ocean Before ‘Pollution’: The Voyage of Saint Brendan” by Liam Lewis, who argues that revisiting “The Voyage of Saint Brendan, a short and popular text recounting an Irish saint’s journey across the sea to visit an earthly Paradise ( … ) from an acoustemological perspective can tell us a great deal about the history of noise on the ocean.” Graham Huggan and Pippa Marland, in “Queer Blue Sea: Sexuality and the Aquatic Uncanny in Philip Hoare’s Translantic Eco-narratives,” bring attention to Hoare’s writing in order to “argue for an expanded view of ( … ) eco-narrative—that charts its littoral and oceanic dimensions,” and “claim that Hoare articulates a vision of nature that is both queer and ecological.” Nicholas Tyler Reich’s essay, “Queer Ecology in (Gay) Post-Pastoral Cinema,” “considers how queer ecology complicates the ways in which pastoral gayness on screen imbricates in more-than-human natures and how ecological belonging manifests in a contemporary gay mise-en-scène.” What Reich aims to understand “is the extent of queer work contemporary gay pastoral cinema performs by invoking what Terry Gifford calls the ‘post-pastoral’ mode, in particular.”

A Mighty Cooperative

A Mighty Cooperative

The itineraries of agency and resistance in the petrofiction of the Niger Delta: Okpewho’s Tides and Ojaide’s The Activist

The impact from natural resource extraction finds expression in the petrofiction of the Niger Delta through the nature and role of characters that function in agency. A study of the major characters in Isidore Okpewho’s Tides and Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist reveals itineraries of human agency in their responses to the effect of oil extraction. While a group of characters shows that environmental action can become a counterpane for self-seeking and self-motivated intellectuals at the detriment of solidarity with all including human, nonhuman and the general economy, this study also reveals that there is still a set of intellectuals that remain consistent to the genuine need for a safe and clean environment. Our overall goal in this contribution is achieved through a renegotiation of the value of agency in both the work of Cajetan Iheka as well as that of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin. Iheka privileges agency that is attuned to a shift from an emphasis on the human to the nonhuman. Huggan and Tiffin accommodate agency that underpins both human and animals. While acknowledging the importance of both positions, this article calls for a return to a focus on human agency especially in relation to the factor of accountability which remains an unfinished business. The call for general action against resource extraction and its impact will remain elusive as long as there are divergences in human agency.

Translation as Strategic Foreignization: A Study of the Politics of Translation in Mother Forest: An Unfinished Autobiography

The study draws upon Lawrence Venuti’s concept of foreignization as a strategic tool employed in the translation of CK Janu’s Mother Forest: An Unfinished Autobiography. The translation works to mould an ethnic autobiography and represent a subaltern subject through explicit signifiers of subalternity, masqueraded as an attempt to “retain the flavour of Janu’s intonation and the sing-song nature of her speech in translation”. As a mode of representation, this study identifies the text as catering to a transnational publishing industry and the global academic marketplace, transforming the cultural value of an ethnic subaltern text into what Graham Huggan describes as “tawdry ethnic goods” in the late capitalist supermarket.

An Unconstructable Indian Ocean: Amitav Ghosh’s Ecological Imaginary in Sea of Poppies and The Great Derangement

In his 2019 book The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation, Frédéric Neyrat opposes the idea that, having come very close to destroying the Earth in the Anthropocene, man can now use geoengineering to reconstruct it. Instead, Neyrat proposes an “ecology of separation” which recognizes the Earth’s self-regenerating capacity as essentially separate from man’s intrusion, thus suggesting that the condition for the world to survive in an age of increasing apocalyptic dangers is an acceptance of the limitations of human agency. This article will argue that Amitav Ghosh’s own ecological project, developed in his 2016 essaybook The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, which started as early as his historical opium war novel Sea of Poppies (2008), narrates an ecology of separation similar to Neyrat’s, a version of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s “green postcolonialism” that confronts Eurocentric aggression against non-European civilizations and against nature

A Sea of Violence and Love: Precarity, Eco-Fiction and the American Factor in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

This paper will interrogate a set of popular tropes and clichés that have become characteristic of the emerging genre of eco-fiction (eg. an impending threat such as an ecological disaster; endangered nature as a force in its own right which protects and threatens the human being; the uselessness of science and technology against the unleashed forces of nature) in a reading of Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide. I will examine the novel’s use of such tropes with hindsight, in the light of Ghosh’s 2016 non-fiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, where the author’s interest in ecology, global warming and the agency of fiction with respect to ensuing threats to human civilization becomes manifest. Using Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s concept of “green postcolonialism”, I will argue that the two books share a deep concern with the ways in which the relationship between nature and culture, which has changed dramatically in the recent decades, mirrors a change in the relationship between the “West” and the “East”. Thus, if colonialism functioned on the basis of an assumption of superiority with respect to non-European civilizations, it is now non-European forms of knowledge, formerly considered “primitive”, that prevail over Western knowledge when it comes to facing nature’s revolt against various kinds of prolonged human aggression.

Discovering India Through Imagery in Postcolonial Travel Writings

During the colonial and the imperial era certain conceptions or images were held and cherished, largely by the white world of the non-white world. Drawing upon the postcolonial theories beginning with Said's Orientalism to Graham Huggan's ideas of postcolonial discourses being marketed and domesticated for Western consumption, an investigation is made here of travel writings about India over a period from 1977 to 2002. This article focuses on the perceptions of India in the following travel writing books: V. S. Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization, Mark Tully's No Full Stops in India, and Sarah MacDonald's Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure. The article discusses the different impressions that the travelers have of India and the representations that they make motivated by their contrasting personal experience and ideas about traditions and culture. For these writers India becomes a fictional construct and a sum of the tourist attraction it lays out through a chronological sequence of events. The article unravels the postcolonial agenda of the postcolonial writers and attempts to build the real image of India through distorted representations in these three travel writing books. The article reflects important cues on the travel writings in India and at the same time openly reveals their transnational link to the global sphere.

Nationalism and the Postcolonial: from Edward Said’s Orientalism to Graham Huggan’s Postcolonial Exotic

As interest in the field of postcolonial studies has grown in recent decades, the theoretical issues with which it is concerned have been applied to an increasing number of areas. As a branch of literary theory, it has provided one of the most important critical platforms for modern theorists and writers who attempt to address issues of cultural identity. However, the analytical potential of postcolonial theory has not gone unnoticed in other academic disciplines. In particular, research into global economics and politics has recognised its relevance to an understanding of the balance of world order and its political dynamics. As was earlier suggested, historians have also demonstrated an increased interest in the area of postcolonialism, particularly in terms of the challenge that it offers to received models of history.Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine the path along which postcolonial studies has travelled to recognise the differences between what used to be pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial, as Ashcroft et al would name it. The paper will discuss the main issues as postulated by the proponents of postcolonialism starting from Edward Said and finishing off with Graham Huggan. Particular attention will be paid to the notion of nationalism and how it provided the fuel to the subaltern (Spivak’s term) to make the colonial the post-colonial, that is, how to construct a new (national) identity in the former colonised.Key terms: postcolonial, nationalism, Edward Said, Graham Huggan

Nationalism and the Postcolonial: from Edward Said’s Orientalism to Graham Huggan’s Postcolonial Exotic

As interest in the field of postcolonial studies has grown in recent decades, the theoretical issues with which it is concerned have been applied to an increasing number of areas. As a branch of literary theory, it has provided one of the most important critical platforms for modern theorists and writers who attempt to address issues of cultural identity. However, the analytical potential of postcolonial theory has not gone unnoticed in other academic disciplines. In particular, research into global economics and politics has recognised its relevance to an understanding of the balance of world order and its political dynamics. As was earlier suggested, historians have also demonstrated an increased interest in the area of postcolonialism, particularly in terms of the challenge that it offers to received models of history.Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine the path along which postcolonial studies has travelled to recognise the differences between what used to be pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial, as Ashcroft et al would name it. The paper will discuss the main issues as postulated by the proponents of postcolonialism starting from Edward Said and finishing off with Graham Huggan. Particular attention will be paid to the notion of nationalism and how it provided the fuel to the subaltern (Spivak’s term) to make the colonial the post-colonial, that is, how to construct a new (national) identity in the former colonised.Key terms: postcolonial, nationalism, Edward Said, Graham Huggan

“Tell it slant”: Postcoloniality and the fiction of biographical authenticity in Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father

In Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Sarah Brouillette expands on Graham Huggan’s exploration of the current entanglement between “the language of resistance” inherent to postcolonialism and “the language of commerce” intrinsic to postcoloniality (Huggan, 2001: 264). Connecting the successful marketing of postcolonial writing with the regime of postcoloniality, Brouillette argues that such a regime requires or projects a “biographical connection” (2007: 4) between text and author so that even postcolonial fiction can be thought of as offering a supposedly authentic or unmediated access to the cultural other. This article discusses Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father (2004), in which the British Asian author narrativizes his ambivalent relationship with his father and retraces the latter’s trajectory from India to the UK of the 1960s and 1970s. My aim is to show how this memoir is very much concerned with the relationship between postcolonialism and postcoloniality even as it foregrounds issues of genre, authorship, and (af)filiation. Highlighting the ambiguities and impossibilities inherent in any referential pact (see Lejeune, 1975), My Ear at His Heart not only complicates the demand for “biographical authenticity” that is seen by Brouillette to condition the niche marketing of postcolonial literatures, the memoir also alludes to the reception of Kureishi’s own work, which was framed by “autobiographical” readings of his early novels. Through an analysis of the ways in which My Ear at His Heart re-places issues of postcoloniality and genre at the heart of the father–son relationship, I wish to suggest that Kureishi still has “something to tell us” about the commodification of “minority” cultures, provided that postcolonial scholarship starts taking issues of form seriously.

Special Section: Articulating Southeast Asia and the Antipodes: Introduction

Introduction:Articulating Southeast Asia and the Antipodes Weihsin Gui (bio) and Cheryl Narumi Naruse (bio) In Merlinda Bobis's poem "word gifts for an australian critic," the speaker (possibly an extension of the poet) recites various Tagalog words to inductively trace her relationships with the Philippines and Australia in ways that signal both connection and difference between herself and an imagined Australian interlocutor. The word for laughter brings a sense of community: so now i can laugh with youhalakhak! how strange.your kookaburras roost in my windpipewhen i say, 'laughter!'as if feathering a new word. (ll. 18–22) But two stanzas later, Bobis's speaker vocalizes something different: this is how remembering begins—ah!—and is repeated—lah!-ah!-lah!alaala. this is our word for memory. (ll. 33–37) While laughter brings the Filipino speaker closer to Australia, with halakhak evoking the call of the famous kookaburra "roost[ing]" in her throat, the verb "feathering" subtly modulates such identification. Aside from its association with a bird's plumage, "to feather" means to shift or rotate the angle of an oar or a propeller blade in motion. This perspectival shift emerges when the speaker brings up "our word for memory": the pronoun "our," coming after the word alaala, implies that the task of beginning and repeating acts of remembrance belongs to the speaker and her diasporic community from the Philippines, a collective recollection that the Australian interlocutor might potentially observe but cannot play a central role in. Toward the end, the speaker repeats all the Tagalog words and observes "how they flow east-west-east-west-east" into everyday conversation (ll. 40–42). Within the Australian sociocultural context, these words become conjoined with, yet remain [End Page 267] distinct from, the English language, as seen from the hyphens that both connect and separate "east" and "west." What Merlinda Bobis performs on a verbal, poetic register is akin to what the cultural studies critic Stuart Hall calls "articulation." Hall builds on the work of Marxist thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Ernesto Laclau to develop his idea of articulation and finds it a useful critical approach because it "has a nice double meaning," as he tells the interviewer Lawrence Grossberg: on the one hand, it "means to utter, to speak forth, to be articulate. It carries that sense of language-ing, of expressing, etc. But we also speak of an 'articulated' lorry (truck): a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another. The two parts are connected to each other, but through a specific linkage, that can be broken." Examining how different elements are articulated with one another rather than spotlighting any particular one "enables us to think how an ideology empowers people, enabling them to begin to make some sense or intelligibility to their socio-economic or class location or social position" (Grossberg 53). For our purposes, what is at stake in articulating various Southeast Asian countries or cultures with Australia and New Zealand is what Graham Huggan (speaking about Australian literature) calls a "transnational imaginary," in which struggles over race and racism construct a national literature as "always effectively transnational, either derived from an apprehension of internal fracture (e.g. via the figure of the culturally hyphenated migrant), or from a multiplied awareness of the nation's various engagements with other nations, and with the wider world" (viii). The essays in this special section, combining Hall's and Huggan's thinking, reformulate internal fractures and multiplied awareness as articulations: through works of literature written in verbal and visual language (articulation as utterance) that illuminate the linkages between two or more sociocultural or politicoeconomic elements (articulation as joining) that matter to specific authors or texts. Here it is worth stating that all but one of the special section's essays are about Southeast Asia and Australia. Without the intention of conflating Australia and New Zealand, it is possible to trace similarities in the way both countries have engaged with Asia, especially in their various "White Australia" and "White New Zealand" policies, which were designed to exclude Asian immigrants and which were discontinued in the 1970s...

A postcolonial framing of international commercial gestational surrogacy in India

The branding and marketing of post-millennial India as a global service provider has been relentless. Indian cities have now been de-exoticized from their previous association to elephants, snake-charmers, and slums, and are now being marketed as the hub of Global North medical infrastructure and scientific advancement, at attractive Global South rates. Legalized only in 2002, international commercial gestational surrogacy (ICGS) in India, a lucrative niche market within the sector of medical and healthcare tourism, has been an industry worth US$ 2.3 billion annually at its peak. Now, however, it stands on the brink of being banned by a bill introduced in the Indian parliament in 2016. This essay advances the argument that the selling points of ICGS have been premised on structural and systemic inequalities of gender and class, as well as of biopolitical power. We further build on Graham Huggan’s early twenty-first-century thesis on the marketing of the postcolonial margins to explore the emergent gendered subjectivities and attendant fictional representations of ICGS and its various actors in the novel The House of Hidden Mothers (2015) by the diasporic British Indian author Meera Syal. Drawing on this novel, we map and examine the perceptions and representations of ICGS, investigating that which facilitates and promotes exploitation to deduce the resultant impact on the stakeholders and active agents in this industry in the space of India and in the West. The essay concludes that, seen through the lenses of re-orientalism, the exploitations within India’s ICGS are not merely along national or ethnic and gender lines, but also class based and geographically enabled.

The Global Program Era: Contemporary International Fiction in the American Creative Economy

Abstract “The Global Program Era” traces the rise of the international writer from the global South in the North American master of fine arts (MFA) program and the resulting effects on the contemporary global anglophone novel. Extrapolating from Mark McGurl's The Program Era (2009), I suggest that the creative writing program not only was instrumental in shaping postwar American letters but also continues to be of great relevance for contemporary global South writing. The article argues that developing-world MFA novelists have redeployed a Cold War programmatic imperative to “find your voice” through the stylistic development of what I am calling “vernacular anglophone realism.” The turn to the non-anglophone vernacular continues the postwar tradition of ethnic ventriloquism for a mainly bourgeois Western audience but also supplements a new non-Western, middle-class audience. Vernacular anglophone realism cultivates a sense of natality without losing the author's linguistic and geopolitical security in the English language, therefore allowing the global South writer to address both Western and non-Western audiences. While this might seem like a welcome development—one that refines an Orientalist market logic diagnosed by Graham Huggan as “the postcolonial exotic”—the article argues that MFA programs have encouraged a style of writing that centralizes the primacy of a global bourgeois/middle-class reader. Subsequently, the global South writer has become firmly ensconced in a financialized American creative market. While global anglophone literature has emerged as a critical reference for persistent injury by British colonialism, the article shifts the conversation to the cultural development of the American anglophone novel to query whether turning to the vernacular evades the problem of U.S. exceptionalism.

An Essay on the Touristic Representations of India Presented in Three Postcolonial Travelogues

This article analyzes the perceptions of postcolonial writers who visit India as tourists and project their vision about people, culture, and region in India in their respective travelogues. As a postcolonial discourse, studies of tourism in countries like India have great concerns over identity and representation. This discourse over culture, political and economic nature has implications for tourism encounters. The three travelogues chosen for the analysis are Sarah MacDonald's Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure, Anees Jung's Unveiling India: A Woman's Journey, and V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness. The article also argues for the postcolonial theory of Graham Huggan, which maintains that postcolonial discourses are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption. Thus, for these writers, India becomes a fictional construct and a sum of the tourist attractions it lays out through a chronological sequence of events. The article reflects important cues on the cultural patterns of globalization and, at the same time, openly reflects on the changing attitudes and perceptions of travel writers as tourists. The study also contributes to the existing literature by making a comparative assessment of these touristic projections.

Thinking Beyond Nationalism in South Asia: Reading the Local as Postcolonial in Fault Lines: Stories of 1971

Although the idea of “postcolonial literature” has been contested by scholars like Aijaz Ahmed (1992), Arif Dirlik (1994), Tabish Khair (2001), and Graham Huggan (2001), the growing geography of global Anglophone literatures continues to contribute to the discussions of literatures from non-Western spaces. While the accusation of misrepresentation against post-colonial literature exists in academic debates, the post-colonial, as Robert Young (2012) has argued, continues to complicate issues of identity, representation and in particular, misrepresentation of Islam in a post 9/11 world. Postcolonialism may still be relevant to re-read the conflict of nationalisms in South Asia. By focusing on the events of 1971, which led to the creation of Bangladesh, we can trace the local variant of the postcolonial. The silenced stories of 1971-especially stories dealing with the problematic of minority identity, genocide, and divided political allegiance-can question national narratives. By investigating the otherwise unspoken accounts of the war, which lie hidden under the Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationalist narratives, we can recast the inadequately captured local stories of national conflict. This paper engages the short story collection Fault Lines: Stories of 1971, to complicate Young’s conceptualization of the postcolonial in the essay, Postcolonial Remains. I will analyze events of 1971 as localized narratives with an aim to complicate Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationalisms and to look beyond the nationalistic propaganda literatures from Bangladesh. This strategy of postcolonial engagement with local narratives aims to inform the discussion surrounding the plight of the Bihari community in Bangladesh, the Bengali collaborator of the Pakistan Army, and Bangladesh genocide in the paper.

Mexico City's “Chinos” and “Barrio Chino”: Strangerness and Community in Cristina Rivera Garza's <em>Verde Shanghai</em> (2011)

This article explores the barrio chino (Chinatown) as a space from which to analyze the perception of China in Mexico through Cristina Rivera Garza's novel Verde Shanghai (2011). Building on Jean-Luc Nancy's “being singular plural” and Sara Ahmed's notion of “strange encounters,” and using Graham Huggan's notions on how the “exotic” can be put into play, this article argues that the Chinatown depicted in the novel lays bare the refusal of boundaries and challenges fixed identities. Embracing ambiguity, the novel opens up the meaning of a mestizo Mexico, and the Chinatown becomes a constitutive part of the cityscape of Mexico City. The novel thus challenges discourses of national homogeneity, informing our understanding of alterity and community.

“I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner”: Resisting the Exotic in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family

In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan argues that while metropolitan audiences ostensibly embrace difference and celebrate the works of postcolonial writers, in reality, postcolonial difference is exoticized—a strategy by which the Other can be accepted without challenging the identity, culture, and conception of the metropolitan Self. However, Huggan also argues that postcolonial writers are aware that their texts are considered exotic, and while they realize that they must participate within this framework, they also develop strategies to resist this. In this paper, I argue that Michael Ondaatje Running in the Family, a memoir that is an attempt to come to terms with Ondaatje's experiences growing up in Sri Lanka, at once participates and critiques exoticism. Ondaatje recognizes how his memoir can be turned into a fetishized commodity (one of the ways through which exoticism works), and to resist this he deploys three strategies: requiring readers to consciously construct the text's meaning, thereby forcing them to take responsibility for their conclusions; confusing readers by avoiding any straight forward emotional response to his parents' failed marriage; and by making readers uncomfortable by drawing intimate connections between the Western literary canon and his family in Sri Lanka.