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

(Hardback)

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The book studies the cultural textsfiction, protest effigies, photographs, films, reportage, eyewitness accounts, campaign posters and reportsproduced around the worlds 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.

Reviews

Pramod K. Nayars 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, University of Idaho, coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication
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, Universitt Tbingen

Author Bio

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