interest” in why she was not more interested in the climate crisis, the implication being that the position it occupied in her mind was so peripheral, she could only approach it through the absence of an aesthetic category which — following Ngai’s formulation — denotes a certain absence in itself.

when deployed skilfully, to probe the affectively and aesthetically ambiguous spaces of ongoingness and compromised agency that increasingly mark contemporary

stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections” (

is literally erased by the waters of the Sundarbans. The uncanny not only

he return of the primordial–another component of the uncanny for Freud (1971, 393)

In order to emphasize the unhomely nature of this home/land Ghosh traces the history of human colonizatio

Here Piya smells Fokir on his bit of cloth, smells that recall and double a similar cloth belonging to her father, a cloth that was “almost a part of his [Piya’s father’s] body” We have an uncanny doubling here, one that is produced by memories of smells. Now the uncanny is closely linked to smell (Giblett 1996, 32-34) because

This trajectory, from the frightening uncanny perceived by the visitors to the “land” of the postcolonial dispossessed, to the relatively secure indigenous canny that renders the same land “home,” is what I explore in this essay.

This essay argues that Ghosh’s critique of the politics of possession/dispossession is worked out effectively through a postcolonial uncanny.

Included in this accommodation of difference is the refugees’ freedom to use the land and defend against its dangers; they refuse to discard that freedom in the interest of adhering to the environmentalist [End Page 647] agenda that commissioned the island as a reserve for endangered wildlife

the erosion of island embankments has noticeably increased due to sea levels that are rising faster than anywhere else on earth.

What this means in the case of The Hungry Tide is that through the lens of geological deep time, one of the novel’s central conflicts becomes how consciously to reconcile modern colonialist responsibility for human violence and environmental [End Page 644] exploitation in South Asia with the accidental consequences of stratigraphic encroachment and global climate change.

the Sundarbans region, threatened by rapidly rising sea levels, has taken center stage in climate change discourse on climate refugees, which was no doubt on Ghosh’s mind when he penned the novel.3

concerned with the work of imagining this other world and other relationalities between material forms.

shared materiality of all things is elevated.”

vital materialism

The correlated hypothesis here is that all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth’s resources (20 percent of the world’s peoples own 80 percent of its resources, consume two-thirds of its food, and are responsible for 75 percent of its ongoing pollution, with this leading to two billion of earth’s peoples living relatively affluent lives while four billion still on the edge of hunger and immiseration, to the dynamic of overconsumption on the part of the rich techno-industrial North paralleled by that overpopulation on the part of the dispossessed poor, still partly agrarian worlds of the South)–these are all differing facets of the central

ethnoclass

geographies. Through narrative and visual culture, Butler and Mutu delink geography and power and put all space into play in order to keep critical attention on black female subjectivity and resistive notions of ecological relationality.

Approaching diaspora as anaformative impulse, in other words, that which resists hierarchy, hegemony, and administration, suggests a different orientation toward this category of politics

Octavia Butler’s harrowing and seemingly apocalyptic depiction of the future centers the instability of the racial, spatial, and gendered organization of our present world

deep space, ours is a view of the present from the standpoint of deep time.

against Lauren’s wishes the ship has been christened the Christopher Columbus, suggesting that the Earthseeders aren’t escaping the nightmare of history but are bringing it with them instead—not solving the problem, but simply starting the Capitalocene all over again somewhere else

Anthropocene by turning human beings into galactic actors, not limited to any one planet’s history or ecology

disastrous decline of late capitalism

the Anthropocene as a kind of neo-Romantic revival of the melancholic fascination with death, illness and morbidity, ruin, and a vanishing natural world

Capitalocene for the Anthropocene, both to highlight what is to blame

fragmenting the white fantasy of a universal human subject and teleological human progress into nonlinear, multi-subject narratives that cannot privilege either whiteness or Europe; we might be tempted to say that geologic time provincializes the human, or even the Earth as such, radically decentering the historical moment called modernity and revealing it to have no particular cosmic importance whatsoever

understand the modalities

As we will see in the next section, a core problematic for thinking about the Anthropocene has been the question of universalism, the notion of a single human species operating along a linear narrative of social and technological progress that culminates in political liberalism and twentieth-century/twenty-first-century technoculture

By now, I think, we critics understand science fiction’s social role as a site for attempting to predict, premediate, resist, and even control the future

deep time.

Here Arendt finds the real world playing catch-up to science fiction: “What is new is only that one of this country’s most respectable newspapers finally brought to its front page what up to then had been buried in the highly non-respectable literature of science fiction (to which, unfortunately, nobody yet has paid the attention it deserves as a vehicle of mass sentiments and mass desires)”