英文摘要 |
One of the functions of the literature, according to Geoffrey Hartman, is to help us “read the trauma” through the power of words. In this essay, I will “read the trauma” through the words of Mumbai-born British writer Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007). Based on the Bhopal chemical plant disaster in India in 1984, the novel focuses on the life of a nineteen-year-old young boy named Animal and tells a story about how the people devastated by corporation’s power defy the global north and work to achieve social and environmental justice for their city and region. The novel reveals that after a lapse of twenty years, the residents of Bhopal (pseudonym Khaufpur) are still fighting the long battle with the US company (pseudonym Kampani). I analyze how Sinha reveals basic concepts such as “nature,” “place,” “body,” “animal,” and “human,” to mean quite different things after an apocalyptic event has occurred. The release of invisible chemicals sets off a “slow violence,” to use postcolonial critic Rob Nixon’s now famous phrase. Based on Nixon’s influential work and that of material ecofeminist, Stacy Alaimo, who proposes a theory of “trans-corporeality,” or the notion that invisible, but material entities, such as chemicals are free to pass among and through bodies, I focus on three key elements for this study: toxicity, slow violence, and transcorporeal ethics. The essay develops a discourse about toxicity, which explores how toxic places, toxic bodies and toxic life-styles are entangled in complicated ways. Then, I focus on the ways that Sinha dramatizes and politicizes the slow violence caused by the local government and the transnational chemical company in postcolonial ecologies. Finally, I ask how post-apocalyptical survivors, such as Animal, recognize a network of the political, economic, social, cultural, and ecological systems that position them outside harmful dualisms in western thought, such as human/animal, insiders/outsiders, profane/sacred. This will reveal the ways that Sinha is repositioning humannonhuman actors in a more just and ethical relation to social political and ecological systems. |