Amitava Ghosh's the Hungry Tide

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Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Critical Realism in Contemporary World LiteratureWeihsin Gui | | | | W | hat does realism mean now to contemporary world or postcolonial literature? In this essay, I propose that novels like Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide challenge the distancing and objectifying force of emerging categories like global and world literature through what Georg Lukacs calls “critical realism.” On one hand, such realism takes what seem to be detailed portraits of life “over there” in faraway places and cultures and makes them contemporaneous with our shared modernity. On the other hand, critical realism also points to a new kind of socially conscious postcolonial subjectivity, one based on professional expertise rather than revolutionary vision.In the growing conversation about global and world literatures, proponents of globalizing literary studies suggest that, given the long history of human trade, migration, cultural dispersion and assimilation, globalization and its circuits of movement and exchange should be the optic through which we understand both contemporary and earlier periods of literature (Jay 2001, Gunn 2001). While this optic is frequently illuminating, its emphasis on transnational mobility and the material aspects of globalization may lead to a neglect of (on one hand) the abiding importance of that which is less mobile, local, or national, and (on the other hand) the ways in which globalization is worked out through symbolic and literary representations, in addition to demographic flows and economic exchanges. Those who favor world literature focus on the multiple ways in which texts are translated across linguistic or geographical borders (Damrosch 2003), circulated through networks of symbolic or cultural capital in a world republic of letters (Casanova 2005), and examined using world-systems theory to account for the
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