Abstract
This chapter analyses Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke (2011), which moves the oceanic focus of the trilogy to the east to situate the narration in the South China Sea and nineteenth-century Canton. Firstly, I analyse the parallels between the prelude to the First Opium War (1839–1942) and neo-liberal policies in contemporary globalisation. On the other hand, I argue that the novel’s reconstruction of India’s involvement in the nineteenth-century opium trade in China provides renewed perspectives on Sino-Indian relations in the Victorian period and today. In particular, my analysis argues that River of Smoke reconstructs a nineteenth-century Pan-Asian perspective on Indian Ocean relations by illustrating alternative models of cultural hybridity as well as idioms, relations and spaces which escaped the control and hegemony of Victorian imperialism.
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Notes
- 1.
Delmas (2016, 26).
- 2.
Ghosh (2011, 23).
- 3.
Ibid., 3.
- 4.
Ibid., 8.
- 5.
Ibid., 15.
- 6.
Ghosh (2015, 288). My emphasis.
- 7.
Quoted in Hawley (2005, 10).
- 8.
Dhar (2017, 8–9).
- 9.
DeLoughrey (2007, 65).
- 10.
Ghosh (2011, 10–11).
- 11.
Ibid., 20.
- 12.
Ibid., 17.
- 13.
Ibid., 21.
- 14.
Ibid., 10.
- 15.
Bragard (2008, 92). An explanatory case is that of African literatures that witnessed a transference of traditional oral forms to its posterior written literature, although it should be pointed out that modern African literatures are to a large extent the product of the European irruption into the African continent. See Vivanco (2017, 21).
- 16.
Bragard (2008, 97).
- 17.
Ghosh (2011, 21).
- 18.
Ibid., 9.
- 19.
Ibid., 8.
- 20.
Frost (2016, 1539).
- 21.
Ghosh (2011, 65).
- 22.
Ibid., 67.
- 23.
Ibid., 184.
- 24.
Frost (2016, 1538).
- 25.
Ghosh (2012b).
- 26.
Chaudhuri (2011, 132).
- 27.
- 28.
An early review of the novel criticised negatively the abundance of contextual information about Canton included in Robin’s epistolary encounters with Paulette: “Robin’s unfiltered monologues allow Ghosh to indulge his encyclopedic tendencies while blaming it on his character; his long-winded missives to Paulette spare no detail, let no back-story slip away untold. Ghosh often appears uncertain of how much of the Indian context he needs to explain to Western readers”: Atlas (2011).
- 29.
Ghosh (2011, 197). My emphasis.
- 30.
Ghosh (2016, 1557).
- 31.
Ghosh (2011, 264).
- 32.
Ibid., 197.
- 33.
Ibid., 197.
- 34.
Ibid., 204.
- 35.
Ibid., 204–205.
- 36.
Ibid., 205.
- 37.
Brown (2013, 117–118).
- 38.
- 39.
Ghosh (2011, 53–54).
- 40.
Ibid., 51.
- 41.
Frost (2016, 1543).
- 42.
Ghosh (2011, 519).
- 43.
Ibid., 81.
- 44.
Delmas (2016, 26).
- 45.
Ghosh (2011, 564).
- 46.
Ibid., 83.
- 47.
Ibid., 82.
- 48.
Batra (2013, 326).
- 49.
Ghosh (2011, 83).
- 50.
Ibid., 84.
- 51.
Chaudhuri (2011, 137).
- 52.
Ibid., 138.
- 53.
Ghosh (2011, 62).
- 54.
Ibid., 290.
- 55.
Ibid., 299–300.
- 56.
Ibid., 498.
- 57.
Ibid., 72.
- 58.
Ibid., 16.
- 59.
Ibid., 235.
- 60.
Ibid., 183.
- 61.
Cowaloosur (2015, 9).
- 62.
Ibid., 9.
- 63.
Luo (2013, 378).
- 64.
Desai (2013, 7).
- 65.
Ghosh (2012a). Ghosh uses the term “xenophilia” after Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship (2005).
- 66.
Ghosh (2011, 162).
- 67.
Ibid., 164–165.
- 68.
Ibid., 164.
- 69.
Ibid., 164–165.
- 70.
Singh (2016, 194).
- 71.
Ghosh (2011, 169).
- 72.
Ibid., 186.
- 73.
Ghosh (2016, 1556).
- 74.
Ghosh (2011, 476).
- 75.
Chaudhuri (2011, 142).
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Martín-González, JJ. (2021). Of Hongs, Achhas and Fanqui-Town: Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke (2011). 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_4
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