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Reading the Postcolonial Island in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-17, 06:27 authored by Lisa FletcherLisa Fletcher
This paper argues that literature has much to contribute to the theoretical work of island studies, and not just because literary texts provide evidence of the ways islands are conceptualized in different historical and cultural contexts. To this end, it discusses Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), a novel which actively theorizes key concepts in island studies. The Hungry Tide is set in the Sundarbans, an “immense archipelago” in the Ganges delta, and tells the largely forgotten history of the forced evacuation of refugees from the island of Morichjhãpi in 1979. The liminal space of the Sundarbans, the “tide country”, is an extraordinary setting for a literary exploration of the relationship between postcolonial island geographies and identities. Ghosh’s depiction of the “watery labyrinth” (Ghosh, 2004: 72) and “storm-tossed islands” (Ghosh, 2004: 164) of the Sundarbans raises and addresses questions, which should be at the heart of the critical meta-discourse of island studies.

History

Publication title

Island Studies Journal

Volume

6

Pagination

3-16

ISSN

1715-2593

Department/School

School of Humanities

Publisher

Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island

Place of publication

Canada

Rights statement

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Repository Status

  • Open

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Literature

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