Invisible Wounds, Colonial Scars: Slow Violence and Eco-Orientalism in South Asian, Malay, and Arab Fiction

Abstract

The paper explores intersections of slow violence, eco-orientalism and colonial ecologies in fiction work in three postcolonial literary traditions: South Asian, Malay and Arab. Based on the work of Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011b), it examines the way in which postcolonial authors describe the gradual environmental degradation by colonial and neo-colonial powers. A methodological comment is pertinent: Abdelrahman Munif wrote Cities of Salt in Arabic, and the fact that it has been translated to English by Peter Theroux (1987) is indicative of cultural mediation and Anglophone circulation politics. Through close readings of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2005) and The Nutmeg's Curse (2021), Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007), Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists (2012), Yang-May Ooi's The Flame Tree (1998), Munif's Cities of Salt (1984/1987), and Omar El Akkad's American War (2017), this paper argues that these texts collectively challenge Western-centric environmental discourses and expose the eco-orientalist construction of Global South landscapes as degraded or ecologically marginal. The paper also critically assesses the Nixonian framework in terms of its limitations, especially the danger of idealising indigenous ecological knowledge, but develops the discussion between postcolonial literary studies and the environmental humanities.