Bhopal's Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny

by Pramod K. Nayar

Overview

The book studies the cultural texts—fiction, protest effigies, photographs, films, reportage, eyewitness accounts, campaign posters and reports—produced around the world’s worst industrial disaster: the Bhopal tragedy of 1984. It makes a case for an ecological Gothic, wherein the city, its landscape and its people are Gothicized. After tracing the history of the disaster as a history of negligence, the book proceeds in later chapters to study the coverage of the events themselves by eyewitnesses and survivors, and the remnants, in various forms, of the disaster – the haunting – within human bodies and nature. Finally, it examines the industrial ruins and the mobilization of protests against Union Carbide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498540452
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	11/22/2017
Series:	Ecocritical Theory and Practice
Pages:	182
Product dimensions:	6.35(w) x 9.32(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Pramod K. Nayar teaches English at the University of Hyderabad, India.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Bhopal, Disaster, Precarity
Chapter 1: The Prefiguration of Disaster
Chapter 2: The Event of Disaster
Chapter 3: Bhopal’s Biopolitical Uncanny I: The Nature of Haunting
Chapter 4: Bhopal’s Biopolitical Uncanny II: The Haunting of Nature
Chapter 5: Bhopal’s Precarity: Toxic History and Thanatopolitics in the Postcolony
Conclusion: ‘Burial of an Unknown Child’ as Icon

Editorial Reviews

Pramod K. Nayar’s application of the Gothic paradigm to texts emerging from the 1984 Bhopal disaster is a startling contribution to material ecocriticism and environmental justice ecocriticism. The Bhopal Gothic, in clarifying the haunted reality of this iconic event, also points to the precarity of our entire planet in the twenty-first century. This is a powerful and important book.

Scott Slovic

Pramod Nayar's incisive reading of Bhopal brings cultural studies methodologies to bear on some of the most acutely pressing issues of our times. In our contemporary Anthropocene, we need activist-intellectual work of this type more urgently than ever before.

Russell West-Pavlov

Pramod K. Nayar’s book, Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny, offers a significant expansion of that limited cultural archive. Nayar engages a large textual corpus that includes fiction, drama, documentary and dramatic film, eye-witness accounts, photography, and Bhopali acts of political protest.. .. If much of ecohorror articulates environmental anxieties and fears in a cautionary mode of potential catastrophe, Nayar offers an important corrective, locating the ecological Gothic in a recent past and ongoing present. Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic will be of interest to researchers in postcolonial, environmental, disability, and disaster studies, and will likely spur further examinations into its textual sources.

South Asian Review