Post-Colonial Disasters and Narratives of Erasure: Reimagining Testimonies of Toxic Encounter

Mainstream media narratives and the official historiography of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy have overlooked the testimonies of disaster survivors, culturally discounting the authority of witnessing in both scholarly discourse and public arenas. This has left a space for novelists, as writer-activists...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:South Asia 2023-05, Vol.46 (3), p.628-647
Main Authors: Rakshit, Nobonita, Gaur, R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bhopal gas tragedy
Biopolitics
Disaster relief
Disasters
Discounting
eco-testimony
Exploitation
fiction and testimony
Historiography
Media violence
Narratives
Nation states
Neocolonialism
Novelists
post-colonial disaster zones
post-colonial necropolitics
Postcolonialism
Survivor
Testimony
Tragedy
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Summary:Mainstream media narratives and the official historiography of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy have overlooked the testimonies of disaster survivors, culturally discounting the authority of witnessing in both scholarly discourse and public arenas. This has left a space for novelists, as writer-activists, to trace the socio-political, economic and ecological injustices of post-colonial disasters like the Bhopal gas leak. Indra Sinha's Animal's People bears witness to such accounts and recreates the night of December 2-3, 1984, through the testimonies of the people surviving the gas disaster. This article identifies Sinha's narrative technique as 'eco-testimony', which strategically revives hitherto undocumented survivor testimonies and their experiences of eco-social exploitation in the post-disaster environment and forges a voice of dissent against the uneven, attritional and necropolitical violence of multinational companies and their chief ally, the neocolonial nation-state.
ISSN:0085-6401
1479-0270
DOI:10.1080/00856401.2023.2202971