Fear and Love in the Tide Country: Affect, Environment,and EncountersinAmitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Fear and Love in the Tide Country: Affect, Environment,and EncountersinAmitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide(2004) to explore Ghosh’s dramatization of the affective impacts of a specific environment on localsubjects, and the role cosmopolitan subjects play in translating those affects into knowable forms through their embodied and affective encounters with the local. My investigation draws upon recent theories of affect—negotiatingbetween constructive and deconstructive views—and placesthediscussionin a framework of eco-cosmopolitan connections. By invoking the coexistence of theaffectsof fear and love, I seek to move beyond the concept of the uncanny, exploring affectboth as emotionsand intensity generated by the socio-ecologicalconditions of the wetlands. I take the affective encounters between the localsand the cosmopolitansas arelational mediumthrough which modes of feeling and knowing on the part of cosmopolitansubjects can be transformed.The uncanny of the environment experienced bythe local can also betranslated into accessible formsthrough this medium, bringing into our sensory ken the slow violence that is far away and out of sightand thereby enablingethical actions.