{"title":"Destabilizing ‘Development : A Critique of Capitalocene in Sarah Joseph s Gift in Green","authors":"Swapnit Pradhan, Nagendra Kumar","doi":"10.59045/nalans.2023.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2023.17","url":null,"abstract":"Dean Curtin (1999) and Mariko Lin Frame (2023) argue that a minor portion of the world’s population has autonomy over resource consumption dynamics, while the majority is confined to the periphery (p. 35; p. 8). The global North sets the standards, as their lifestyles based on resource exploitation are depicted as ‘developed’. Promoting such ‘ecologically impossible’ conducts as benchmarks of development has grave consequences in the global south, where the ecological experiences of human beings are driven primarily by aims of subsistence and survival (Curtin, 1999, p. 35). Gift in Green (2011) by Sarah Joseph narrates the plight of a closely knit Pulaya (Dalit) community in Kerala, India. Their harmonious coexistence with the surrounding environment is manifested through the indigenous ecological structure. The congenial relationship between humans and nature is disrupted by Kumaran’s ideals of extractive and urban-industrial development. Eventually, the Edenic village ‘Aathi’ turns into a stinking dump yard of toxic pollutants. The “people of the ecosystem,” who rely on the meager resources around them, are deprived of their primary source of survival. Through close textual analysis of this novel and with a critical background informed by bioregional, ecocritical, and developmental theories, the article exhibits three facets of the central argument. First, we investigate how indigenous ecological structure strengthens human-nonhuman connections. Further, the essay demonstrates how Anthropocentric developmental notions based on ecological imperialism, extractivism, and capitalogenic plundering of the environment systematically destroy the socio-ecological fabric of the village of Aathi. Finally, the article explores the feasibility of environmentally and socially just development models.","PeriodicalId":36955,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Narrative and Language Studies","volume":"68 1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83465786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Development vis-à-vis Degrowth: Stories of Resistance, Struggle, and Survival from the Postcolonial Western Ghats","authors":"Sunu Rose Joseph, Shashikantha Koudur","doi":"10.59045/nalans.2023.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2023.18","url":null,"abstract":"One of the eight “hottest hotspots” of biodiversity according to UNESCO, the Western Ghats have much to be credited for the historical prosperity of western peninsular India. The colonial era marked the beginning of the ecological diversity of the forests of the Ghats, spawning new rules and policies in the state. The consequent land allocations posed a challenge to the community identity of the indigenous tribes of the region. Even after India’s independence, the native successors in governance and land ownership inherited the capitalist and imperialist policies claiming to reduce poverty through development. The rampant growth strategies and the unpredictable climatic variations with a cycle of drought and torrential rain further threatened the ecological stability and also pushed the native tribes into destitution and displacement. This paper attempts to analyze literary works chronicling the tribal lives of the Western Ghats alongside social narratives on the recent harsh adverse effects of unsustainable growth in southwest India. The acclaimed novel Kocharethi the Araya Woman brings to the fore powerful statements of race and land rights of the Arayar community against the backdrop of the Western Ghats. The woes of the Badaga population of the Nilgiris amidst development interventions are core to the novel When the Kurinji Blooms. The paper attempts to read how the poignant narratives from the Western Ghats are a clarion call to redefine development through a broader cultural process of decolonizing the growth paradigms.","PeriodicalId":36955,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Narrative and Language Studies","volume":"75 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83813806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Precarious Denizens: The Dogs of War and Conflict","authors":"P. Nayar","doi":"10.59045/nalans.2023.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2023.11","url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies two texts about animals in conflict zones: Sadat Hasan Manto’s ‘The Dog of Titwal’ and its graphic adaptation by Arif Ayaz Parrey and Wasim Helal’s ‘Tamasha-e-Tetwal’, in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Partition collection, This Side That Side. In Manto, the deterritorialized dog creates an animal heterotopia. The dog is also significant in that its precarious life between two territories transforms the political organization of space into what Stuart Elden terms ‘terrain’. Such an organization’s biopolitics involves fauna and flora as well.","PeriodicalId":36955,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Narrative and Language Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86446763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Witnessing Tribal Life and the Environment: An Ecological Re-reading of the Select Narratives of Mahasweta Devi","authors":"Payel Pal","doi":"10.59045/nalans.2023.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2023.19","url":null,"abstract":"The current ecological crisis in India must be traced back to its origins because, similar to Western beliefs and practices, colonization of the natural world is fostered and justified. Materialistic creed, techno-culture, enlightenment principles of human progress, and industrial developments successfully exploit the resources of nature and threaten the existence of rivers, lands, and their flora and fauna. As a result, the lower sections of society, including the deprived and marginalized tribes, bear the inevitable outcome of this exploitation of nature, and the tribal are pushed into socio-cultural and economic decline. The condition of the tribal people and their environment find best expression in the works of Mahasweta Devi, one of the most famous journalists, social activists, and creative writers of West Bengal. After witnessing the pitiful condition of the tribes of Western, Central, and North-East India, she decides to delineate their livelihood, and naturally their relationship with nature comes into discussion. Her writings trace the ecological history of India, and for this she cites incidents from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and thus her narratives encompass the journey of the tribes from forest life to industrial life. The lost ecological histories of the tribals are again shown in The Book of the Hunter. The close bond between nature and men is given the fullest expression here, and their ecological wisdom should be followed and embodied to avert the current ecological crisis. The recreation of the tribal history of the Mundas, historical events of the Ulgulan, and ecological movements are portrayed in Aranyer Adhikar and Chotti Munda and his Arrow. In the same way, in her short stories like Seeds, The Hunt, Little Ones and Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha, she not only depicts the ecological equilibrium of tribal culture, but also the subjugated condition of the tribal and their lands, forests, and surroundings, so this paper delineates the ecological history of the tribes in the selected works of Mahasweta Devi.","PeriodicalId":36955,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Narrative and Language Studies","volume":"280 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75782709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Epistemic (dis)belief and (dis)obedience: Zakes Mda s The Heart of Redness and the decolonial ecological turn","authors":"Goutam Karmakar, R. Chetty","doi":"10.59045/nalans.2023.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2023.13","url":null,"abstract":"The Heart of Redness (2000) by Zakes Mda deals with an epistemological conflict and exposes the hideousness of colonial epistemology in dismantling indigenous belief systems and commodifying South African land and ecology. The novel revisits the decisive event of cattle killing in 1856–57, following Nongqawuse’s prophecy, and juxtaposes it with the cultural and epistemic clash of two factions, Believers and Unbelievers, in the post-apartheid era. The present article analyses the unresolved breach between the Believers and the Unbelievers and notes how the latter’s appropriation of Western modernity’s notion of progress and civilization perpetuates the interventions of capitalist forces, aggravating serious threats to land protection and indigenous ecology. The article focuses on Mda’s critique of the South Africans’ compliance with the colonial models of civilization and probes how the novel emphasizes delinking and repudiating the patterns and perceptions of development normalized by Western modernity. In so doing, Mda’s novel foregrounds the necessity of indulging in what Mignolo (2009) terms “epistemic disobedience” and endorses critical decolonial thinking and praxis to counter covert forms of colonial oppression and capitalist objectification. The article extends the notion of “decolonial turn” (Maldonado-Torres, 2008; Grosfoguel, 2007) by arguing that the novel elucidates a “decolonial ecological turn” to combat extractivist agendas and exploitative policies, preserve indigenous ecology, and foster alternative ways of sustainable collective living.","PeriodicalId":36955,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Narrative and Language Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89485700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘To Learn from Nature, not to Exploit Her : Discerning Postcolonial Green Speculations in Vandana Singh s Indira s Web and Widdam","authors":"Sakshi Semwal, Smita Jha","doi":"10.59045/nalans.2023.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2023.15","url":null,"abstract":"As a new generation of writers and artists from the Global South deal with the effects of human-caused environmental damage and climate change, they rely heavily on science fiction and fantasy as a genre to show the most important parts of the Anthropocene. Due to the geographical peculiarity and history of the colonial past, the Global South experiences inequitable effects of the Anthropocene as compared to the Global North. Therefore, speculative climate fiction from the Global South demands a critical interpretation contextualized in the geopolitics of the Global North and the Global South. The paper discusses the manner in which science fiction anchors ecological consciousness in the narratives from the Global South and further strives to depict the specific traits of Global South SF that make it different from Global North SF. This study intends to investigate two short stories, Indira’s Web and Widdam, by an Anglophone science fiction writer, Vandana Singh. The paper demonstrates how Singh’s stories, firstly, subvert the hegemony of western sciences by legitimizing indigenous knowledge systems as scientific, rational, and eco-friendly, and, secondly, criticize the need for technological and neo-colonial advancements at the cost of our environment. With the analysis of these stories, it would be argued that postcolonial futuristic fiction not only acts as a tool to question anthropocentrism but also functions as an appropriate literary form for enunciating environmental crises and climate change affecting the Global South.","PeriodicalId":36955,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Narrative and Language Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76599324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Screening Eco-trauma in the Context of Post-socialism: “The Great Flood” and Local Identity Crisis in Chinese and Vietnamese Independent Films (the Cases of Taking Father Home and 2030)","authors":"Hoang Cam Giang","doi":"10.59045/nalans.2023.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2023.16","url":null,"abstract":"As two of the few socialist countries in the Global South today that share a deep root of Confucianism and have had intense contact with capitalism in the last two decades, Vietnam and China have many cultural, ideological, and political similarities. Significantly, China and Vietnam have a similarly long tradition of water control and pride in managing the power of rivers and water, as evidenced in mythological, fairy tales, and historical books. The Yangtze and the Mekong are the two largest rivers that profoundly influence and impact their respective cultural, spiritual, economic, and social lives. Since the 1990s, with the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and industrial plants next to the Yangtze and the mangrove deforestation next to the Mekong, in the context of Post-socialism, these two river deltas have faced unprecedented severe environmental challenges. On the other hand, the images of the two rivers and two river deltas appearing in official state-funded and commercial films are isolated from the actual situations mentioned. By examining two typical independent movies from China and Vietnam about the Great Flood, Taking Father Home (2005, Ying Liang) and 2030 (2014, Nguyen Vo Nghiem Minh), this essay highlights the eco-awareness of those affected, especially the sense of eco-trauma, related to the natural disasters in the Yangtze and Mekong deltas. This essay will in particular analyze how the globalization process in these two socialist countries causes multi-level harm in localities, both culturally and environmentally. Moreover, drawing from the concepts of indigenous cinema, we will highlight the aesthetic ability of independent films to question the limitations of commercial and state-sponsored movies, which always romanticize native natural landscapes on-screen and produce eco-ambiguity among the public.","PeriodicalId":36955,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Narrative and Language Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83089679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Capitalocene and Slow Violence in Gabriel García Márquez s One Hundred Years of Solitude","authors":"Işıl Şahin Gülter","doi":"10.59045/nalans.2023.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2023.12","url":null,"abstract":"The term Global South originates in the social sciences, where it invokes the notion of a global North-South divide to organize nations according to socioeconomic and political status. In a literary context, the Global South signifies an ongoing endeavor to engage with the current global disposition by identifying its externalities and providing the framework in which wide-ranging and cross-regional resistance might be imagined. Drawing on this point of view, the Global South can be regarded as a resilient political imagination originating from the marginalized peoples’ mutual recognition of analogous circumstances under contemporary capitalism. Recognition is, therefore, the critical point for the construction of Global South consciousness, which will enable those people to activate solidarities that can be put into action toward the goal of liberation. In this context, this paper intends to investigate Gabriel García Márquez’s portrayal of an environmental apocalypse in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which offers rich possibilities for thinking about García Márquez in relation to the Global South. Paying particular attention to the geographical vulnerability of the Global South and Márquez’s representation of the transnational banana company’s ecocidal practices in Macondo, this paper establishes an analogous connection between capitalism’s externalities and its impact on the environmental degradation and the living conditions of local communities. Drawing heavily on Jason W. Moore’s notion of “the Capitalocene” and Rob Nixon’s theory of “slow violence,” this paper indicates that One Hundred Years of Solitude highlights the intersections between the analogous deterioration of the poor people’s living conditions and the environment in Macondo, offering multiple entry points from which socio-ecological connections are embodied and conveyed to the readers.","PeriodicalId":36955,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Narrative and Language Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85189758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Language Spoken with Words: Decolonization, Knowledge Production and Environmental Injustice in the Work of Abdulrazak Gurnah","authors":"M. Ferreira","doi":"10.59045/nalans.2023.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2023.20","url":null,"abstract":"The paper analyses the relationship between decolonization, climate change, and environmental injustice as represented in the writings of Abdulrazak Gurnah. Gurnah’s work is considered an example of decolonial literature. Decolonial literature has focused on issues beyond the nature of the colonial subject, highlighting the relationship between the capitalist world economy and the formation of modern decolonial subjectivities, namely the exposure of those subjectivities to environmental injustice. The paper intends to answer the following research question: how does Abdulrazak Gurnah address the articulation between decolonization, climate change, and environmental injustice? The paper argues that Gurnah addresses such an articulation by discussing knowledge production about the colonial subject and the postcolonial self and instituting an association between environmental/climate precarity and biopolitical precarity. Building from two of Gurnah’s novels—By the Sea and Afterlives – the paper debates how Gurnah’s characters are afflicted by the racialization of social and economic relations and biopolitical and climate precarity. Questioning knowledge production about the colonial subject and the postcolonial self is significant because it underscores the importance of transforming how knowledge about climate change is produced. Instituting an association between environmental/climate precarity and biopolitical precarity permits debating how colonial and capitalist power structures are responsible for disseminating environmental injustice, foregrounding the epistemic importance of indigenous climate change studies. The work of Gurnah is critically analyzed, bearing in mind the need to discuss the relevance of addressing climate change and environmental injustice from the perspective of global south literature.","PeriodicalId":36955,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Narrative and Language Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88724989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Human that Therefore I am: Transculturation of an Ecological Debate in Green Humour for a Greying Planet","authors":"Shrabanee Khatai, S. Ladsaria","doi":"10.59045/nalans.2023.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2023.21","url":null,"abstract":"The present research aims at showcasing the transculturation of animals that have adapted human culture in delineating the cause of the environment through Rohan Chakravarty’s Green Humour for a Greying Planet (2021). The book is a compilation of comic strips that have previously appeared on various other platforms over the last decade, ranging from subjects of human-animal relationships to ecological unbalance and the impact of COVID-19 through the voices of animal characters. It primarily deals with threats to the habitat of animals (non-humans) and environmental degradation because of untoward human activities. The Anthropocene, the current geological epoch, is an offshoot of excessive human exercise on planet Earth, resulting in the deterioration of its natural resources and affecting the lives of other species. It has resulted in humans perceiving non-humans as ‘other’ to themselves, thereby diluting the concepts of ‘symbiosis’ and ‘co-being’. This paper attempts to view humans in relation to non-humans toward an agenda of establishing ecological balance. Derrida’s analysis of the ontology of animals in The Animal that therefore I am (2008) focuses on the influence of animals on human lives and vision. Taking this analysis as a parameter, this paper endeavors to decode the animal sentiment as displayed in the comic strips in Chakravarty’s book. This paper uses Franz Kafka’s transcultural ape, Red Peter’s creation of an ape-human culture, as a model to decode the neoculturation of human-animal interaction in Chakravarty’s animals. By referring to the studies of anthropomorphism and anthrozoology, this study attempts to analyze the ecological debate of a world model where humans and animals play interchangeable roles. Subsequently, the paper scrutinizes the ‘language-game’ that the animal characters indulge in to homogenize species differences.","PeriodicalId":36955,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Narrative and Language Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76051573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}