Mutating Toward the Future: The Convergence of Utopianism, Postcolonial SF, and the Postcontemporary Longing for Form in Amitav Ghosh’s the Calcutta Chromosome

Abstract

This article examines the way that secrecy and silence are raised from the level of colonial imposition to postcolonial methodology in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome. Drawing on Ghosh’s claim that any attempt at forming a counter-modernity to the experience of imperial modernization would necessarily have had to operate without record, it argues that silence and secrecy form a counter-hegemonic practice to the instrumentalizing form of Western rationality. As such, the novel performs a postcolonial decentering of futuricity from Western capitalist epistemology, eschewing a mastery of the past to reopen the possibility of a future beyond imperial logic.

These Overheating Worlds

“…I am aware that this is a partial and selective approach, and unfortunately follows a Western bias in much ecocriticism and science fiction studies. See inter alia Hollinger and Gordon (2002), O'Connell (2012), and Estok (2013). 2.…”