Abstract
Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy—Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015)—is one of the most outstanding contributions to sea fiction in the last decade. This introductory chapter makes a case for analysing Ghosh’s trilogy from the viewpoint of maritime criticism and the ‘Oceanic’ turn in literary criticism. The central claim of the book is that Ghosh’s take on Indian Ocean exchanges in the early nineteenth century can be read as an era of proto-globalisation that allows for an analysis of contemporary global politics and neo-liberalism. This introductory chapter maps the position of the Ibis trilogy within Ghosh’s oeuvre more broadly to ascertain the continuities of Ghosh’s literary work that cut across the Ibis series and to highlight which elements in the trilogy can be analysed from a transoceanic viewpoint.
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Notes
- 1.
Abbas (1997, 5–6). Original emphasis.
- 2.
Wong (2015).
- 3.
England (2012).
- 4.
Bell (2007, 2).
- 5.
Parry (2004).
- 6.
Larsen (2002).
- 7.
Dwivedi and Kich (2013, 10).
- 8.
Rediker, Pybus and Christopher (2007, 2).
- 9.
Mondal (2007, 3).
- 10.
Hawley (2005, 12).
- 11.
John C. Hawley illustrates this by citing some examples from Ghosh’s oeuvre: the Indian slave in In an Antique Land , the street urchin in The Calcutta Chromosome or the fisherman in The Hungry Tide (Hawley 2005, 16). Ghosh’s focus on these ‘anonymous’ individuals unrecorded by history also situate him side by side with the Subaltern Studies group. Ghosh himself contributed to this South-Asian network of researchers with the publication of “The Slave of MS. H.6” in Subaltern Studies (Ghosh 1993), which lies at the genesis of In an Antique Land .
- 12.
Quoted in Hawley (2005, 7). Conversely, Robert Dixon has suggested that Ghosh’s fiction concurs with a significant concern of contemporary anthropology, namely “the porosity of cultural boundaries” against the more anthropological traditional view that cultures were self-contained units with clear-cut boundaries (Dixon 2003, 10).
- 13.
- 14.
Fletcher (2011, 4–5).
- 15.
Moorthy and Jamal (2010, 4).
- 16.
Ghosh and Muecke (2007, 2). Original emphasis.
- 17.
Moorthy and Jamal (2010, 24).
- 18.
Mohan (2019, 7). In a 2007 interview Ghosh himself disavowed the term ‘postcolonial,’ arguing that writers should pay attention to the specificity of each place and location, rather than wrongly “imagine that the postcolony of India is the same as the postcolony of Pakistan or whatever” (Kumar 2007, 105). Still, notwithstanding the much debated issue of historical specificity in postcolonial thought, Ghosh’s fiction inescapably illustrates many of the concerns, problematics and predicaments that typify the postcolonial condition.
- 19.
Dussel (2006, 168).
- 20.
Bragard (2008, 115).
- 21.
Cooppan (2009, xvii).
- 22.
Ibid., xvii.
- 23.
Ibid., xvi–xvii.
- 24.
Mondal (2007, 15).
- 25.
Machado (2016, 1547).
- 26.
Desai (2006, 1531).
- 27.
Frost (2016, 1539).
- 28.
Desai (2006, 1531).
- 29.
Grewal (2008, 184).
- 30.
Lazarus (1999, 62). Original emphasis.
- 31.
Ibid., 63.
- 32.
Grewal (2008, 184).
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Martín-González, JJ. (2021). Introduction. In: Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy . Maritime Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77056-3_1
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