Human/Non-human Interface and the Affective Uncanny in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Resumo

Abstract

Postcolonial fiction depicting transnational human mobility across landscapes and cultural spaces often represents the variable “structure of feeling” in a human being with continuous ‘de-’ and ‘re-territorialization’ (Grossberg 313) from the familiar space to the unfamiliar. Experiences of lived realities and relationships alter with time and space, simultaneously affecting human understanding of logic and thereby leaving a scope to interpret newer experiences on multiple levels such as the mysterious, uncanny, or the exotic. It is not just the fictional character/s in literary narratives but also the reader/s who feel affected by the relationality between the rational and the mysterious as emotional affect “arises in the midst of in-between-ness” (Seigworth and Gregg 1). The epistemic lens of affect theory has been used in this essay to explore the human/non-human relationships in Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019). I would show how, in Ghosh’s narrative, the human/non-human interface has been perceived by inventories of belonging and migration, and often represented with an interplay of the corporeal and the uncanny, mainly aiming at emotional affect sandwiched between anxiety and hope— both conditions of postcoloniality and ecological engagement. The representation of the human/non-human relationships in literary narratives depends heavily on imaginative correspondence, where the affective exceptional may find its easy place. Examining several episodes in the novel, I would discuss how the corporeality of a snake, spider, shipworm, or even a wildfire affects the incorporeal cognitive dimensions like trauma or anxiety in Dinanath— the central character, and reshapes his “structure of feeling.”