Home > Catalogue > Il Tolomeo > 22 | 2020 > Dwelling, Dispossession, and “Slow Violence” in the Time of Climate Change

Il Tolomeo | Vol. 22 | December 2020

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Research Article

Dwelling, Dispossession, and “Slow Violence” in the Time of Climate Change

The Representation of Refugees in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Nicola Pilia    Università degli Studi di Torino    

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abstract

In this essay, I will analyse the crucial issues of dwelling and dispossession concerning refugees in the novel The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh. Political and environmental displacement is addressed within the framework of ‘slow violence’ as proposed by the landmark work of Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). With the intention to define the Morichjhãpi refugees as a foreshadowing of the climate migrations involving the lives of the subalterns in South Asia, as argued by Brandon Jones (2018), the essay provides a historical background of the Morichjhãpi Massacre and studies the forced eviction narrated in the novel through the pages of Nirmal’s diary. Together with Kusum, the Marxist professor experiences the tragedy of the subalterns in the ever-changing ecosystem of the Sundarbans, bridging the gap between environmental and postcolonial categories while providing fruitful insights within the notions of human history and ecological deep time.

Published
Dec. 22, 2020
Accepted
Oct. 19, 2020
Submitted
June 30, 2020
Language
EN

Keywords: Displacement • The Hungry Tide • Slow Violence • Migrations • Ecocriticism

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2020/22/024

Copyright: © 2020 Nicola Pilia. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.