Monster Ecologies: Material Eco-Rhapsody and the Bio-Gothic in Animal’s People

Abstract

Abstract: This article demonstrates how Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People incorporates bio-gothic aesthetics to address the unprecedented ontological, perceptual, and political challenges presented by the Bhopal chemical disaster. Bio-gothic aesthetics refer to biological substrates to represent a “trans-corporeal” body (Alaimo), one enmeshed with a damaged environment, where disruptions to the ecosystem return to disturb the so-called normal behavior of the body. Sinha’s novel mobilizes a typical character from gothic fiction—the monster—to perform an embodied critique of neoliberal globalization. The bio-gothic monster reveals the body to be a site of universal (but unequal) precarity and risk, a surface of intervention for disciplinary power, and a node in a multi-species network of irruptive, improvisational resistance. By analyzing moments of material eco-rhapsody, in which drugs or other psychoactive chemicals enable Sinha’s narrator, Animal, to tap into an extrasensory beyond and channel a damaged-yet- resilient environment, I describe how the bio-gothic monster offers new ontological, phenomenological, and political formations capable of resisting neoliberal global amnesia. The bio-gothic monster serves as a site where the seemingly immaterial flows of global capitalism become fleshy and, therefore, as a key node for the formation of new, feral assemblages in the pursuit of postcolonial environmental justice.