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Seeing double in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People : Local toxins, global toxicity and the universal Bhopal

2018; Taylor & Francis; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17449855.2017.1402808

1744-9863

Deb Donig,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

This article explores the way in which Indra Sinha’s (2007) novel Animal’s People showcases the challenges of evidencing mass suffering in an increasingly global arena. Finding that the globalized context of international law is grounded in a discourse of comparison, it argues that Sinha’s representation of the Bhopal Gas Disaster veers between authenticating atrocity by evidencing its universality, putting it within the legislative purview of international human rights, and simultaneously evidencing its uniqueness, thus taking it outside the global economy. The article shows how the fallout of atrocity in Bhopal, the product of globalized corporation gone terribly wrong, gets caught between local and global spheres of legal redress, and it enquires into the ways in which a body of postcolonial literature navigates between the universal and the particular to make the experience of one local atrocity legible to a global audience.