From a Single Disaster Victim to a Possibility for Global Solidarity: Imagining the Posthuman in Animal's People by Indra Sinha
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2021
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Haverford College. Department of English
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The Newton Prize in English Literature
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
This paper explores Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People, a fictional representation of a real-world ecological disaster, and its imaginative implications through the theory of the posthuman. The narrator and protagonist—a gas leak victim who adopts the name Animal as given to him in childhood to mock his deformed back—acts as an dramatic center to a broader debate on the exclusive authority of the human in matters of the environment. A traditional ecocritical lens, concerned with human responsibility and action towards preserving the environment, assumes a categorical and hierarchal distinction between human and the environment, enforcing an intermediary requirement for victims of ecological disaster to either prove their worth as humans or prove the worth of their environment to the greater human community in order to receive aid. Drawing from Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman, this paper analyzes Animal as a character who "used to be human once" (Sinha 1), and how his alternative mode of being offers a form of resistance against the classic and unsustainable human-animal hierarchy. Using Justin Johnson's ""A Nother World" in Indra Sinha's Animal's People," this paper examines the implications of a posthuman reading of Animal, his people, and Khaufpur as a whole, aspart of an apocalyptic aestheticization of the posthuman subject, demonstrating how the futurity of the posthuman institutes a new form of decentralized environmentalism that threatens to undermine the procedural corporate dehumanization and environmental degradation.