Industrial Disease and Postcolonial Affect in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion

Abstract:This article examines the significance of skin for thinking about postcolonial affect by exploring "epidemiological affect" in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. Epidemiological affect, the novel suggests, arises from a worker's immersion in unclean (and diseasing) industrial environments and their simultaneous position within colonial regimes of racial and hygienic cleansing. Within the novel, the skin's affective placements in exposure, ideation, and solidarity reveal a highly ambivalent process: the assimilation of racialised white immigrant identity through labour, in which assimilation means both the cleansing of difference and the acquisition of social and economic capital. Ondaatje's rendering of the affective life of the skin thus follows Achille Mbembe's recommendation: that to account for postcolonial relations of power—their effectiveness and psychology—we need to go beyond the binary categories (like passivity versus resistance) so frequently deployed in the analysis of domination. Instead, exploitable but eventually assimilable white industrial workers in the novel oscillate between resignation and jouissance—states transacted by their compromising embrace of contamination and cleansing and mediated by the text's aesthetics of submersion and explosion.