City Research Online

Abstract

South Asian literature has a history of engaging with ecocriticism and environmentalism from a postcolonial, locally specific perspective. New materialism shares this ecocritical commitment through its posthumanist conceptions of embodiment and material entanglement between human and nonhuman material agencies. Despite their common interest in alternative possibilities for human and nonhuman engagement, new materialism and South Asian literature have rarely come into meaningful contact with each other. My article seeks to bring both fields together by examining Kiran Desai's novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard from a new materialist perspective, in which human and nonhuman characters interact with each other in imagining posthumanist possibilities of being in the world. I mobilise Karen Barad's agential realist theory and Stacy Alaimo's concept of trans-corporeality to argue that Desai's light-hearted comic satire raises important questions about environmental and human exploitation. Examinations of the local, national, global, and historical aspects of India's material reality reveal the agential realist nature of human and nonhuman interactions within the novel's rural postcolonial context. This reading expands the scope of new materialism into South Asian literature and furthers the possibility of using new materialist theory to engage with ecocriticism from a postcolonial perspective.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Publisher Keywords:	ecocriticism, Kiran Desai, new materialism, postcolonial literature, South Asian literature
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity School of Communication & Creativity > Department of Media, Culture & Creative Industries
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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