Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Migrant workers play an increasing role in Asia, where they are both remarkably mobile and largely disorganized. The workers’ position leaves them disempowered within the workplace; it also leaves them vulnerable in the world outside. In this sense, migrant workers lead lives that are, in Hannah Lewis’s view “hyperprecarious”. The celebration of the collective has been a recurrent trope in Ghosh’s oeuvre, and this article seeks to shed light on the formation of communities of migrant labourers in a transnational space in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island. It explores the heterogeneity of exploitative labor conditions, their situatedness as well as their “lived experiences” documenting the variegated landscape of neo-slavery for vulnerable migrant workers. It also highlights how Amitav Ghosh interrogates the ways in which the Western colonial episteme has commodified nature, land, mountains, and ecology in his most recent writing.
Source: Critical South Asian Studies
Author: Binayak Roy
Institution: North Bengal University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4388130089