Bioprecarity, Disposability, and the Poetics of Hope in Swarga

Mediations, 2017

Nature takes its revenge for the debasement of the human being to an object of power, to raw material.' -Adorno and Horkheimer 1 Given that the world-system is a thoroughly differentiated physical environment divided between zones of production, in which peripheral environments suffer heightened resource extraction and environmental degradation in an age of accelerating climate crisis, developing a methodology attentive to the systemic nature of combined and uneven development across the world-ecology is an urgent task for environmental literary studies. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the Enlightenment's production of a duality between externalized nature and internal human nature serves to rationalize human domination of the material world, but also threatens an eventual revolt of nature. 2 Adapting Fredric Jameson's theory of the political unconscious, Adrian Ivakhiv has called for a 'global-metereological reading practice' of the 'geopolitical unconscious' in order to reverse 'ecological unconscionisation,' the ideological mystification of ecological destruction. 3 Ivakhiv argues that the Cartesian project has 'repressed the entire network of biological interdependencies and corporeal confraternities that shape and structure our material existence'(107). Thus, he proposes 'a geopoliticised ecocriticism' to excavate ecopolitics in their 'latent and indirect manifestations'(101). Ivakhiv's analysis of how such phenomena as military-industrial nuclearization, petro-dependency, and neo-imperialist devastation of Mesopotamian environments, are manifested as uncanny returns of the repressed, storms of 'monstrous excrescences, gothic or sublime' is confined to contemporary films such as Magnolia and Ice Storm (108). However, in this chapter, I will attempt to elaborate a praxis for reading the capitalist world-ecology in gothic literature, exploring how literary form can embed the socialecological contradictions of capitalism. I offer a case study of 'global eco-gothic,' reading the viral excrescences and monstrous transformations of human bodies into vegetable matter in Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled (2005) as gothic apparitions that register the world-ecology, particularly the ecological regimes corresponding to neoliberalism and financialization.

African Studies Review, 2022

Cajetan Iheka's monograph Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature is a critical contribution to the discourse on African ecocritical thought and scholarship. Historically, works of literature that focus on the environment have often focused on the impacts of environmental degradation, oil pollution, natural disasters, and desert encroachment from the human perspective, with little to no account of the effects of these disasters on other biotic components of the environment. Through this crucial contribution, Iheka emphasizes the need to explore and appreciate the complex relationship that exists or that should exist between human and nonhuman elements of the ecosystem. In investigating, problematizing, complicating, and analyzing the relationship between humans and nonhuman agents as represented in African literature, Iheka hopes to "extend the domain of African literary studies from one primarily focused on humans to one that explores the complexities of human-nonhuman relations in the different sites under consideration; rethink the dominant notion of agency based on intentionality and propose ways of conceiving distributed agency or varieties of agency functioning between human beings and other environmental actors" (3). Considering the paucity of scholarship on the effects of environmental degradation on nonhuman components, Iheka's book is a welcome and timely intervention and contribution to that discourse. Written partly in response to Neil Lazarus's call in The Postcolonial Unconscious for a postcolonial study that aligns with relevant contemporary issues, including questions of land, geography, and the environment, Iheka references and expands on different theories from a variety of disciplines. He not only highlights the human effects of environmental degradation but also examines the nonhuman factors-effects on plants, animals, forests, soil, and water-and their interrelationships as a complex whole. The book's arguments unfold in four broad chapters.

452ºF. Revista de Teoría de la literatura y Literatura Comparada (Universitat de Barcelona), 2019

Journal of Humanistic and Social Studies, 2019

Human being's interaction with nature is generally verbalized in various forms, and literature is definitely one of these forms. As one of the recurrent themes in writing, nature has managed to attract the attention of numerous writers especially the novelists. The literary interest in nature and environment has resulted in the emergence of ecocriticism which studies the relationship between literature and environment. This new method of ecocriticism has proven itself to be useful in highlighting the spreading environmental issues in today's globalized world. For this reason, this theory, a holistic approach to literature seeking to examine the relationship between man and his environment, has been employed to determine the depth and extent of damage that human beings inflicted on their natural environment. Therefore, the paper attempts to explore and analyze human beings' tireless efforts to damage or destroy their environment towards the satisfaction of their insatiabl...

2017

In global capitalism biopolitical and necropolitical mode of life reproduce hand in hand, yet differ greatly in their management of life. However, the central thesis of the proposed text is that biopolitical mode is intensively passing into necropolitical mode, resulting in deprecation of the so-called good life, positing abandonment as the central structural contour of the global capitalism, making abandoned body its collateral damage. To delineate the concept of abandoned body and to demonstrate that its abandonment should be understood as the central structural process of global capitalism, this paper will first, by referring to Achille Mbembe, Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, and Marina Gržinić, illustrate that contemporary historical formation of capitalism is in fact a neoliberal global necrocapitalism, i.e. a structural formation, where capital’s surplus value is based on the capitalization of death, consequently urging us to critically address the concept of biopolitics, which, according to Gržinić “/…/ is a horizon of articulating contemporary capitalist societies from the so-called politics of life.” In this vein, the paper will propose that this engagement is done by a historization of biopolitics, evoking Giorgio Agamben’s work on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, only to further extend it by introducing Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics from 2003 and Gržinić’s conceptualization of biopower and necropower from 2009, where, as stated by Gržinić, biopower should be understood as the exercise of the power “to make live and let die” and necropower as the exercise of the power “let live and make die,” basically demonstrating that biopolitics and necropolitics are two distinctive modes of governmentality, yet necropolitics, in comparison to biopolitics, proving itself to be a lot more suitable concept for analysing contemporary societies, due to their prevalent use of the logics of war machine and state of exception. If the so-called good life is to be associated with biopolitics, this paper will propose that the abandoned body should be associated with necropolitics. In fact, the proposed formulation of the abandoned body needs to be understood as a specific topological figure, by which new modes of governmentality of current capitalistic mode of production could be addressed. The concept of the abandoned body will draw from the work of various authors, but mainly from Giorgio Agamben, Ariella Azoulay, Michel Foucault, Marina Gržinić, Achille Mbembe, Walter Mignolo, and Šefik Tatlić, although the main structural premise of the suggested concept will be based on the hybridization of a theoretical triangle of three authors and their unique theoretical positions: Foucault’s subtle envision of the effects of predominance of biopolitics in 1976; Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics in 2003 and Gržinić’s readings of Foucault and Mbembe, especially her thesis of necropower in 2009. If abandonment of the abandoned body is to be understood as the essential structural process of today’s global capitalism, is it still possible to talk about the potentiality of abandoned body’s emancipation? In its final remarks, the paper will suggest that the potentiality for abandoned body’s emancipation lies in decolonial articulation of potentiality, following Achille Mbembe’s political figure of “becoming the Negro of the world” in his Critique of Black Reason (2017).

New Academia , 2019

Ambikasutan Mangad is a Malayalam novelist and short story writer from Kerala who has fictionalised the Endosulphan tragedy that affected the people of Enmakaje in Kasaragod district of Kerala through his novel Enmakaje (2009) translated into English as Swarga: A Post Human Tale (2017). This paper seeks to show how the agenda of rights, both human and non-human emerges in the novel. It will do this by taking up concerns of Human Rights and Environmental Rights. The paper would address questions like rights of the child, right to water, right to clean environment, intergenerational justice, advocacy for acting, the use of threat and also highlight the contrast between monoculture agriculture and cultural diversity of Enmakaje. It would thus show how a creative work becomes a "cultural apparatus" in understanding the narrative of Rights.

Ethik und Gesellschaft 1/2024: Ge|teilte Wirklichkeiten, 2024

Under the ruinous conditions of the Anthropocene, the relations of crisis diagnosis have shifted from human interaction to human-nature relations. Critical social theories, with their focus on social practice and discourse as the basis of reality, are often accused of being unable to grasp these crises adequately. Instead, I want to show that Rahel Jaeggi's concept of a critique of life forms offers the possibility of reconfiguring this position. Reread Jaeggi through Karen Barad's feminist neo-materialist perspective on liveliness shifts the inquiry of the crises of life forms from how they transform to who takes part in its becoming. The issue of action-ability becomes the question of who is capable of taking/being part (response-able) in collective life. Perceiving reality as interwoven has the emancipatory potential to (re-)configure care for a shared world. 'We' share our world not only between humans in our social prac-tices, enacting this world. 'Our' world is constantly (re-)configured and is today critically troubled by the nature/culture dualism. Consequently, a critical theory that questions not only social activity but the binary-making practices of nature and social is urgently needed for a shared world at its lose. A more response-able world is one more cared for.

Ecocriticism is a theory that sheds light on literature and environment. Markandaya brings out the impact of industrialization and its changing factors upon society and upon country within her literary milieu, thereby breaking the common notions. The change begins with the commencement of tannery, thereby changing the hopes, lives and nature in the village.The cost of their lives, the class distinction , the question of survival, and the limited choices with which the characters are left. In the quest for their survival, their entrance to city and the severe losses can be reflected upon. The novel depicts economic-industrialization growth of India, bearing changes to post-independence, portraying changes of the fanatic growth which inturn depletes the landscapes and livelihood. The paper is an attempt to unmask the cliché of industrialization and modernisation, upon the developing country like India, having adverse effects on the environment and mankind woven through the narrator. Through the personae of Rukmani, Markandaya unmasks the cliché's of industrialization and modernization. She reflects on the new dawn and its impeccable changes made to the civilization and the nature. Rukmani observes from being a young maiden, the innateness of nature and land, seeing her spouse Nathan, from a constructive agrarian over the years failing in his destitute, loosing land, survival,

American Behavioral Scientist, 2014

At this particular historical conjuncture, human-made crises—from ecological disasters such as the BP oil spill or the Fukushima nuclear accident, to food shortages and national economic calamities—have rightly gained attention, and the prospect of real limits to consumption seem ever present on the horizon. According to David Harvey, such “[c]rises are moments of paradox and possibility out of which all manner of alternatives . . . can spring.” It is these moments, or encounters, of paradox and possibility that I address in this article. I specifically consider novel ecological political articulations that have emerged out of indigenous movements that unmask the material foundations of world history and demonstrate cracks in a dominant ideology that commoditizes all matter—living and otherwise.