Postcolonial Transcorporealities in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007)

This chapter explores the methodological affordances of New Materialism in representing non-anthropocentric and non-eurocentric ecological epistemologies and practices. It argues that a new materialist framework, which affirms the agential and self-creative powers of materiality and highlights the enmeshment of human and nonhuman agents, can illustrate the combined effects of colonialism, global capitalism and the imposition of Western epistemological categories upon the Global South. By analysing Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007), I aim to demonstrate that a narratological methodology predicated upon New Materialist knowledge structures can explicate the consequences of Western systems of exploitation and extraction on the intermingled lives of humans and nonhumans, illustrating the interconnectedness of the struggles for racial, economic and environmental justice.The second aim of this paper is to contribute to scholarship on magical realism as ecological discourse advanced by Ben Holgate (2019), examining how Indra Sinha’s novel explores “questions about […] the place of embodied humans within a material world.”1 I investigate how conceptualisations of matter and material situatedness circumscribed by New Materialism can explicate how the bridging of ontologically distinct planes (“the real” and “the magical”) that magical realism hinges upon explores the intermingling of human and nonhuman actors and makes visible the non-differentiation between human subjects and the environment.

Full Text