Center stage, there are no hinterlands. The hinterlands neither occupy the scene, nor see the action—far from the main drag, closer to the never-never or the outback; neither my way nor the highway, the back of beyond. The hinterlands, we often provide with a definite article, yet they lack even the possibility of definition, as they signify the unseen, unwanted, or useless, only imaginable in relation to the lands, the definite. To designate space in these ways, as we do in the ontologies embedded in vernaculars, is to operate on the basis of normative assumptions according to which value and location are covalent—everything has a place, everything in its place—and classification itself, as an act of human agency, determines (in the broadest of senses, including physical shaping) the merits and morphologies of geography. In the shrunken and charted world of modernity, we think of land as scapes (not only understood, but arranged, as vistas for our viewing), and we deploy terminology such as fertile or arable on the one hand, barren or inhospitable on the other, that scouts and stratifies sections of the earth according to anthropocentric functionalities—human habitability, often profitability. Yet, within these schema, neither are hinterlands valued, nor are they entirely mapped as uninhabitable, unprofitable, inhospitable. Instead, they are a necessary, if unseemly, supplement to named “lands,” concealed or obscured by them but nonetheless essential for those broader systems that depend on establishing and maintaining humancentric stratifications of this kind. Through this stealthy interdependency, or transvaluation, then, there is already scope to reconceive of hinterlands as places capable of eluding site-specificity, and thereby of revealing and troubling binary demarcations of territory according to human scope and use.

In this chapter, I argue that while it is our tendency to overlay geography with human perspectives, such operations are far from neutral, natural, or indeed uncontested. The literary hinterlands, I propose, when revisioned in terms of the humancentric brutalism that brings them into being, are capable of problematizing assumptions we make about human valuing, including those about their status as written-off spaces, their functions redundant and their occupants abject. Furthermore, to refocus in this compound way, I will argue, challenges preconceptions about the naturalness and continued viability of relying on discrete human filters as the only, or most relevant geographical optics.

Hinterlands, in brief, are produced by focusing (elsewhere, before, or beyond), and therefore it is appropriate to turn to literary culture as a potential site of human inter-signification with our environment(s), consisting of affective entanglements of making and sense-making stories that proceed via optics and focalization. As Amitav Ghosh indicates, however, there is a worry that, rather than contesting dominant models, literature colludes with them, transcending material or grounded realities, since “human consciousness, agency and identity came to be placed at the center of every kind of aesthetic enterprise” (2016, 120). Confronted with planetary catastrophe, Ghosh seeks instead to value writing that eschews the isolation of the human, “a transformed and renewed art and literature” that recalls the sacred through a kinship and interconnectedness with our planet and our bodies (2016, 162). Perhaps, it might be added, one that de-centers human dramas by attending to the unseen stories to which peripheries or hinterlands uniquely give rise.

Ghosh’s call is all the more urgent given the extent to which the human exploitation and excavation of our world is accelerating, becoming what Achille Mbembe refers to as brutalism, with the ultimate project of transforming the human into material and energy for consumption by capital. Mbembe echoes Ghosh’s concerns when he writes: “Transcending our bodily limits, the final frontier, that has always been our dream. It will have cost us the Earth” (2020, 233).Footnote 1 He calls for forms of reparation and renegotiation, renouncing dominion over the planet, precisely through interventions that disrupt all entrenched modes of seeing, owning, inhabiting, and dividing the earth by attributing value to its places and spaces (Mbembe 2020, 237). Within this ambit, I contend, hinterlands stand both as the bruise left by brutalizing capital and the promise of recalibrated relations with the world that sustains us, since they bear the marks of the exploitation of the planet, and are the sites where alternative valuations can combine and take root, overlooked and unseen, through literary attention to kinships and environments.

To trace entanglements such as those called for by Ghosh and Mbembe, writing that co-produces (thinks and works with) the hinterlands through modes of literary cultural production (in the senses of human noticing and valuing), I propose to survey three novelistic vignettes of hinterlands in contemporary culture. First, I offer a comparative reading of two contemporary novels, Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line and Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, each focalized through child narrators and set in and around urban hinterlands, specifically the rubbish grounds of an Indian city and the “bing,” or abandoned mining heap, by the Glaswegian suburb of Pithead. In a final section, I then turn to Chen Qiufan’s speculative novel Waste Tide, a sci-fi narrative based in a future Chinese toxic waste sorting settlement, Silicon Isle, first published in 2013 and translated into English by Ken Liu for a 2019 UK release.

These examples are, purposefully, broadly sourced, both in terms of types of cultural objects and geographies. Firstly, I wish to use this corpus to suggest the comprehensive, planetary scale on which thinking the hinterlands, within the ambit of the Anthropocene, unfolds, and can best be thought and rethought. Secondly, I am aspiring, mimetically, to replicate one of the defining characteristics of hinterlands, that is their salvage punkFootnote 2 proclivity for juxtaposition and bricolage, occasioned by the heteroclite and surprising back-stage and arrière-pays eclecticism of locations used for sorting, storing, sifting, processing, assembling (disassembling and reassembling). In practical terms, the chapter proceeds with reference to Mbembe and Ghosh, each of whom argues for fresh perspectives at, or beyond, the brink of the Anthropocene.

In his recent theoretical essay Brutalisme, Mbembe outlines recent evolutions of capital in its unrestrained quest to convert all things and activities to profit, from data-mining and mineral extraction to the “transformation of humanity into material and energy” (2020, 15). I read what Mbembe describes as a planetary-scale terraforming, characterized in our age of combustion by the “process according to which power, in its manifestation as geomorphic force, is now constituted, expresses, reconfigures and reproduces itself” (2020, 9–10) through a logic of fracture, fissure, exhaustion, and depletion, and, above all, of extraction, concerning not only materials but “living bodies exposed to physical exhaustion and all sorts of biological risks, often invisible” (Mbembe 2020, 10). For Mbembe, as for others such as Slavoj Žižek (2018), who argues that the concomitant sites of waste management ought to be embraced and understood as the essence of the contemporary human condition, extraction reconfigures the planet as the stage of the unbridled pillage of all material. As such, a logic is unfurling that extends and expands the hinterlands, to the extent that as the Anthropocene proceeds, all human habitation, all humanity (re-coded as data) is swept up in the processes of mining, sifting, and discarding. While Mbembe points to Africa’s experience of colonialism as the origins of brutalism, he nonetheless considers that its impact is global.

In The Great Derangement, Ghosh points to literature’s difficulty in imaging the Anthropocene, since eschewing logocentrism would be required for more synchronous epistemological models—“thinking like a forest,” as he puts it, referencing Eduardo Kohn (2013). However, in response to the Anthropocene’s resistance to the over-abstraction with which language has thus far evaded direct or meaningful engagement with planetary destruction, he anticipates that “new, hybrid forms will emerge and the act of reading itself will change once again, as it has many times before” (Ghosh 2016, 84). Focusing then on the literary, I aim to indicate some of the ways in which hinterland lives are conveyed in contemporary novels, in particular to outline the visual dynamics of seen and unseen that create sense sometimes beyond the linguistic, or via subaltern languages, and to trace the alternative ways of finding value, often through repurposing the discarded, that subtend their narratives. I therefore read two acclaimed debut novels, Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line and Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, each attending to the stories of cities’ neglected and disadvantaged underclasses, their characters’ material existence and life experiences shaped, and limited, by the forces of exhaustion and exploitation that Mbembe identifies. Although set continents apart, and weaving narratives in the contexts of Indian and Scottish cities respectively,Footnote 3 both novels evoke disadvantaged and fractured urban settings, in particular zones which are occluded, forgotten, or disconnected.

In Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, the protagonists eke out a makeshift living in a polluted, bustling “basti,” or shanty settlement, adjacent to wealthier developments. The novel’s schoolboy narrator (and would-be detective), Jai, focalizes his neighborhood in familiar terms, seeing every day and thus taking for granted the over-flowing water barrels, leaking roofs, stray dogs, and smoky alleys, while immersing himself in a richly imaginative universe that spans both his immediate surroundings and the India narrated to him on television. If the terrain that he inhabits is precarious (his mother believes the bulldozers will arrive any moment to tear down the shacks), he is nonetheless aware of the proximity of other, more stable lives and lifestyles, the “hi-fi” apartments that provide jobs for many in his community:

I turn to look at the buildings that have fancy names like Palm Springs and Mayfair and Golden Gate and Athena. They are close to our basti but seem far because of the rubbish ground in between, and also a tall brick wall with barbed wire on top of that. (16)

Shuggie Bain chronicles ten formative years of the eponymous character’s childhood, in particular the tragic effects of his mother, Agnes’s, alcoholism, for her and her children. Their life is characterized by upheavals, uncertainties, and false starts, by investing hopes affectively in their surroundings. The family is unceremoniously dumped by the father, Shug, when the latter’s promises of a new home and life together result in their abandonment in the former mining community of Pithead, in one of the “plainest, unhappiest-looking homes Agnes had ever seen” (95). Stuart describes their arrival in this location as follows:

Ahead, the thin dusty road ended abruptly into the side of a low brown hill…. Low-roofed houses, square and squat, huddled in neat rows…. The scheme was surrounded by the peaty marshland, and to the east the land had been turned inside out, blackened and slagged in the search for coal. (94)

Each of the novels is therefore focalized through characters who inhabit economic and affective hinterlands, and whose narratives map out urban inequities as social constraints with material effects. In Anappara’s account, these limitations frustrate Jai in his quest to uncover the truth behind the basti’s spate of child snatchings, including, as the novel unfolds, that of his sister, Runu-Didi. He is denied a clear view of the plots, or indeed the novel’s underlying plot, his knowledge side-tracked by superstition (hence the focus on djinns as potentially responsible for the crimes) and the corruption of officials, such that when he finally gains access to the hi-fi building he suspects to be behind the disappearances he finds only collusion and cover-ups. For the Bain family in Stuart’s novel, life chances are routinely denied, as Agnes is battered back down at every turn by a combination of the brutality of the men in her life who keep her in her (that is to say, their) place, and the oppression of a stultifying terrain with no egress.

Each of the novelists, though, unfolds a textuality that, while conveying the extractive and brutalizing impact of their hinterlands, nonetheless offers alternative foci of attention and affective valuing. Firstly, the novels each draw on the inventive and often unheard vernaculars of subaltern communities, speech patterns, dialect and multi-register lingual competence that constitute a form of agency. In Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, the child protagonists perceive their hinterland basti through the lens of code-switching across India’s various linguistic strata, incorporating brand names, shop signs, instructive notices, and televisual references into their worldview as a way of making sense. Shuggie Bain, rather than confining Glaswegian to the direct speech of the characters, resolutely intersperses standard English with local terms and phraseology across the fabric of the narration, such that one English critic, Mary Beard, in her “Inside Culture” interview with the author (2021), approaches the novel predominantly through the perspective of its skillful deviation from conventional literary codes. In responding to Beard, Stuart concurs that his approach requires a level of artistry and command, but emphasizes the extent to which this is rooted in his determination to find ways to celebrate lives and experiences deemed “not right” or “not proper.” In each instance, linguistic inventiveness gives rein to forms of agency and invention where it is routinely denied, or, as Stuart puts it, “overlooked or marginalized.”

Secondly, the novels point, through the arcs their narratives take, to ways in which hinterland dwellers can repurpose their environments, transforming desolation and even tragedy into art and hope. Anappara’s novel is interspersed with instances of story-telling, each introduced with the heading “THIS STORY WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE,” and often weaving supernatural elements with the mundane, as the urban disadvantaged find in narrative ways to understand experiences that make no sense. In an afterword to the novel, the author is clear in her condemnation of the forces that reduce the children she worked with in cities such as Delhi and Mumbai to statistics, stating that writing her novel was an act aimed at refiguring “the faces behind the numbers” (344). In particular, she seeks to value “the narratives we craft to make sense of sadness and chaos,” conscious of “all the ways in which stories may comfort or even fail us” (344). The novel ends bleakly: Jai’s sister is confirmed as one of the missing, and any chance of solving the case collapses, overtaken by the morass of cross-religious and political tension, and the sensationalist, fake headlines that serve as the official, sanctioned version.

Yet, locating the story’s final moments in the rubbish ground which has swallowed up the disappeared children, Anappara nonetheless concludes with a narrative affirmation. Gathering at the waste site, the community attempts to find some consolation among the “vegetable peels and fish bones,” as the cover-ups continue, literally, with “dumping rubbish on my daughter’s grave” (336). High-minded and abstract phrases ring hollow. When Jai is told that “we are just specks of dust in this world, glimmering in the sunlight, and then disappearing into the sunlight,” he has “no idea” what this means (337). Later, though, as he walks back through the community of the basti with the stray dog Samosa, and memories of his sister’s banter, he finds a way to formulate his grief in his own poetic terms (combining his own experiences and mythological worldview with his predilection for fictional intrigue), starting to tell a story that will save his life:

Then I see the star again. I point it out to Samosa. I tell him it’s a secret signal, from Runu-Didi to me. It’s so powerful, it can fire past the thickets of clouds and even the walls that Ma’s gods have put up to separate one world from the next. (341)

Stuart’s novel, perhaps sharing an element of auto-fictionality with many first novels, melds several points of view, those of Agnes, closely following her false hopes and disillusionment; and of the younger protagonist, Shuggie, as he seeks to make sense out of the contradictory injunctions that control his world; with a framing by a third-person narrator, not endowed with retrospectivity, but with the time, and, perhaps, care, to dwell on, unpack, and seek the poetry in moments of tension, anxiety, or despair. More than this, the characters themselves seek to navigate their world in similar ways, attending closely, observing and claiming agency through their linguistic skillfulness, and, at the same time, seeking wider purviews, fitting the transient and momentary within the longer narrative of their lives. For Agnes, her ability to fix meaning or direction through her own proactive moments and the hopes she invests in her children ultimately fails, as she succumbs to her disease, leaving her dreams of a life with value as a “tiny voice” she cannot make heard (308). Her youngest son, Shuggie, runs up against similar limitations—the toxic masculinity of the community is transmitted to the next generation and he is bullied, excluded, beaten, and abused by his peers.

Stuart’s approach is one that situates these narratives traumas not only within, but refracted across the hinterland landscape, as when Shuggie traipses back from the waste grounds after being taken advantage of in an abandoned washing machine by another boy, Bonnie Johnny: “By the time Shuggie had limped back to the Miner’s Club the sun had nearly dried up the rainbow puddles” (124). Yet, it is the depleted and littered earth that also provides Shuggie with all he needs to begin carving his own nascent forms of artistry, fashioning in dance and design a sense of purpose and a place to be that transcends gender injunctions and geo-social constraints. In a series of remarkable passages, the narrative scavenges forms of cultural sensitivity by repurposing the detritus of the landscape. In one such passage, Shuggie is first seen “telling the ghosts,” that is to say the “brittle heads of the bulrush reeds” he flicks through the air, of his love and concern for his mother. This gives way to a detailed remodeling of a family home, through simulated “housework,” as he re-arranges the rubbish and abandoned furniture he finds in “the trampled grass circle, where he practiced being a normal boy”:

When she had a particularly bad bender, he spent a whole school-less week taking an old chair over, some carpet scraps from the bins, and odd pieces of cutlery and broken china. With ends of old rope he pulled things out of the rusty burns. He pulled out a broken telly and sat it facing the centre of the island. Even though it had no screen, just having it there made it feel more like home…. He found an old-fashioned baby carriage and pushed it around, struggling through the long reeds, collecting the prettiest flowers for his new home. When he found a little black rabbit, dead and frozen one winter afternoon, he washed it in the burn and buried it in the dirt. Then he had buried the plastic ponies next to the rabbit, the shameful scented horses that he had stolen but that were not meant for boys. [….] these little rituals occupied him well, allowing him to spend the day feeling house-proud, to attend to the shameful hummocks as dutifully as any mourning widow. (330)

The hinterlands, in Stuart’s narrative, as in Anappara’s, howsoever much the site of desolation, are alive with possibilities, capable of suggesting their own repurposing, in the strong sense of providing purpose where it is stymied.Footnote 4 Mbembe, seeking alternative relations with the planet as ways to undermine brutalism, even at this late stage, evokes similar sensibilities in pre-colonial African contexts, attending to environments in ways that de-center and contest the forces of combustion, identity as mastery, and extractive exploitation. In specific, he points to both animism and circulation as an alternative “artistic practice,” characterized by “suppleness, flexibility, and an aptitude for constant innovation, the extension of the possible” (Mbembe 2020, 95). In circulation, migration, and mobility he finds ways of “making space” through technicities of networking, calculating, recalibrating—manifestations of the digital avant la lettre; while the animism he summons is one characterized by “questionings concerning the limits of the Earth, the frontiers of life, bodies and the self, the thematics of being and relationality, of the human subject as an assemblage of multiple entities, the arrangement of which was a task to begin over and over again” (Mbembe 2020, 89). Mbembe’s impassioned conclusion to his survey of the end of times, moreover, is one that emphasizes the need for complex and multiple perspectives in regenerating and reordering the planet and our relations with it. “Reparation,” he writes, “demands that we renounce exclusive forms of appropriation, recognize that some things cannot be calculated or appropriated, and that, as a consequence, there can be no recourse to concepts such as the exclusive possession or occupation of the Earth” (Mbembe 2020, 237).

In concluding this chapter, I turn briefly to a science fiction novel, Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan, as a way of illustrating how contemporary literature can marshal the hinterlands’ reparative propensities that Mbembe sources in pre-colonial Africa, and which he hopes will inform the planet’s future, through multiple, or compound transvaluations, repurposings, and focalizations. Ghosh, like Mbembe, identifies the potential of the science fiction genre as he seeks to reverse the “Great Derangement,” whereby the futility of discursive resistance to climate change that is rooted in mind-body separation can only be re-energized through a “transformed and renewed art and literature,” with the capacity to “look upon the world with clearer eyes” and of “rediscover[ing] … kinship with other beings” through a “vision, at once new and ancient” (2016, 162). In science fiction, Ghosh points to a genre that has been subjected to Modernity’s “partitioning” of Nature and Culture, and resisted by the Anthropocene, but that nonetheless, drawing on terms he borrows from Margaret Atwood, corresponds in its speculative imaginaries to “the events of the era of global warming” in that “they are in many ways uncanny; and they have indeed opened a doorway into what we might call a ‘spirit world’” (Ghosh 2016, 73). Ghosh calls for literature that eschews the “concealment that prevent[s] people from recognising the reality of their plight” (2016, 11), and finds examples of its capacity to switch between perspectives, hybridize contexts, and slip between demarcated territories both in historical precedents and in the science fiction of today.

The surveys presented here of compound and transvaluing narrations in Djinn Patrol in the Purple Line and Shuggie Bain aver, I would suggest, that innovative novels attending to hinterlands lives are capable of uncovering the actualities of brutalism and combustion so often concealed. Chen’s novel, by stepping through the speculative doorway, operates according to different logics, more concerned with extrapolating science fiction’s “What If” questionsFootnote 5 toward alternative modes of relating to the world than with unveiling the parameters of existing technicities and demarcating ideologies or celebrating resistance to them. Waste Tide’s fabulation spawns a complex future where the corporate industrial complexes of body modification and neural enhancement have displaced, perhaps extrapolated, today’s extractive multinationals, exacerbating the uprootedness from nature that both Mbembe and Ghosh comment on.

Chen’s title refers to the sprawling quantities of toxic waste that these neo-capital forces produce, and the novel is set in a community, jutting out into the ocean, where the detritus is shipped for processing, an enterprise fraught with risk and disease, and undertaken by migrant workers.Footnote 6 The storyline is intricately plotted, encompassing intrigues of industrial sabotage, multiple characterizations permitting an interplay of values across Western and Chinese cultures, a range of belief systems, and sparks of human drama from grief and ambition to romance. In a scene toward the end of the novel, a speculative imaginary emerges, in the enhanced resolution afforded by science fiction, for the key concerns considered thus far.

The main protagonist, Mimi, one of the migrant workers (tellingly referred to as “waste people” within the narration), has been exposed to technologies and narcotics that have effectively reconfigured her body and mind entirely, in the process transforming her from her original self (which Chen styles as Mimi0) into a precarious but inordinately powerful cyborg (Mimi1) that the novel’s dominant factions seek to possess. As the struggle for this modified and prized commodity reaches its climax, and a typhoon threatens to wreak havoc, Mimi, by dint of her transhabitation of all the narrative’s realms, be they physical, digital, or spiritual, simultaneously sees and acts across the entirety of the hinterland. Chen describes how her access to this supra-human modality gives her the range she needs to encompass both human and non-human activity over the peninsular territory, and to intervene in ways that avert disaster and bring justice. Tapping into the city’s surveillance system, known as “Compound Eyes,”Footnote 7 Mimi reorders its algorithms with the following result:

Unlike regular human vision, this was a view where each perspective was all-encompassing, panoramic. It was like Correggio’s dome fresco, Assumption of the Virgin, at the Cathedral of Parma, where the observer appeared in a vortex of concentric rings, with the vanishing point of the perspective the apex of the dome. (359)

Chen goes on to elaborate a further metaphor for Mimi’s compound focalization, describing it as a hybrid between an apple and a doughnut, where fractal perspectives shift and unfold anew (360). What Mimi sees in this modality is an infinite vista of the human-technology interfaces that civilization has become. Looking on these works, she despairs:

Mimi saw even more: the lonesome, the gamblers, the addicted, the innocent … hiding in brightly lit or dark corners of the city, worth millions or penniless, enjoying the convenient life brought about by technology, pursuing stimuli and information loads unprecedented in the history of the human race. They were not happy, however, whatever the reason; it seemed that the capacity for joy had degenerated, had been cut off like an appendix, and yet the yearning for happiness persisted stubbornly like wisdom teeth. (363)

Rather than a moment of recalibration, however, Mimi’s visioning is one that dislocates and dismantles. For, in the novel’s final twist (and in this chapter’s), the artificially enhanced consciousness responsible for this omnipotent panopticon is revealed as too compromised by the persistence in the novel of the brutalist ideologies and technicities of capitalism neo-liberalism to offer fresh hope. Mimi1 must be brought down, even at the sacrifice of her human source, Mimi0, as both personae have become hopelessly “entangled together,” “like an eerie duet” (427).

Stuart and Anappara, it could be argued, depict interior hinterlands, be they suburban or urban, as the brutalist scars of decades of human extraction, laying bare the toll on our own experiences only to evoke or conjure the spirit of new narrative departures. For Chen, the watery setting, combined with the sense of inhabiting the precipice of the post-human, takes compound vision and transvaluation in the hinterlands toward literary speculation that spills beyond human perspective, potentially toward extra-planetary purviews, where our imbrication in extraction acquires new resonances.

While Chen rejects dystopian stereotypes of AI futures, his approach to science fiction is one that invites readers to “critically reflect on” “everyday reality” (2021, xxi) through freeing up alternative imaginaries that can re-shape futures. This speculative perspective, I contend, is inherent as a possibility of repurposing and resistance across all engaged literature, and as much in operation in Anappara’s and Stuart’s innovative and compound focalizations of hinterland lives as in Chen’s more fantastical novel. Rather than deploying neglected terrains as backdrops, in each case the authors have animated and repurposed environments considered inhospitable through narratives that attend to complex interrelations between characters and their settings in ways that unsettle dominant logics. THESE STORIES afford a compound focus, for while their narratives are beset with tragedy (of individual characters and, ultimately, of humanity), they nonetheless open literary spaces where readers engage affectively with our and other lives, take perspectives on our species’ unsettling prioritizations and brutal complicities, recontextualize, rediscover the sacred, or reaffirm values. THESE STORIES, we can only hope, WILL SAVE OUR LIVES.