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

Description

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. Contents......Page 7 Preface......Page 9 Acknowledgments......Page 11 Introduction......Page 15 1 The Prefiguration of Disaster......Page 25 2 The Event of Disaster......Page 49 3 Bhopal’s Biopolitical Uncanny I......Page 73 4 Bhopal’s Biopolitical Uncanny II......Page 101 5 Bhopal’s Precarity......Page 131 Conclusion......Page 163 Bibliography......Page 171 Index......Page 181 About the Author......Page 183