Mobilizing the past: The God of Small Things’ automotive ecologies

ABSTRACT

This article provides a reading of Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel The God of Small Things while contributing to criticisms of global capital’s impact on environmental preservation during the era of the Anthropocene. While The God of Small Things has often been the subject of ecocritical and postcolonial readings, there has yet to be a concentrated study of Roy’s interweaving of automobility and subalternity in the text. Building on the findings of the Subaltern Studies Group, this article cites critics of globalization and proponents of new materialism to identify how ideologies of automobility cultivate human capital by incorporating subaltern classes into global systems. Rather than depowering the subaltern person, this incorporation provides opportunities for resistance, which Roy depicts as instances of agential traffic. Through its readings of roadways and automobiles, the article illustrates how effective critiques of the environmental impact of the Anthropocene can simultaneously highlight the importance of subaltern history.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial ecocriticism
• automobility
• globalization
• Anthropocene
• India
• environmental justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A thorough analysis of Gramsci’s “subaltern” and its use/“appropriation” by the SSG is beyond the scope of this analysis. Massimo Modonesi (2013) criticizes the SSG for a theoretical “diffusion” of the term, stating that the scholars “got confused in the attempt to square a subalternism, that is, an essentialism that was able to reconcile the experience of subordination as matrix of the processes of political subjectivation with the practices and experiences of resistance, rebellion, and autonomy” (34).

2. See Chakrabarty (2000) for an explication of how British colonists and orientalists “conquered and represented the diversity of Indian pasts through a homogenizing narrative of transition from a medieval period to modernity” characterized by lack (32).

3. Western automobility and urban infrastructure widened divides between class and race in the USA.

4. Green-Simms provides a thorough accounting of Fordism, the idea “that all societies would eventually achieve the level of production and consumerism as the West” (2017, 17).

5. See George T. Martin (2015) for explanations of figures from the United Nations, World Health Organization, and the World Bank: for example, in 2010 India suffered 231,027 road traffic deaths – almost 19 deaths per 100,000 people, though the country owns only approximately 18 vehicles per 1000 people (31). Also, see Lydia Polgreen (2011) for a narrative illustrating the systemic disenfranchisement still faced by Dalits in terms of automobility.

6. This in itself is not particularly counter to what many new materialist scholars argue: Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010) claim that “no adequate political theory can ignore the importance of bodies in situating empirical actors within a material environment of nature, other bodies, and the socioeconomic structures that dictate where and how they find sustenance, satisfy their desires, or obtain the resources necessary for participating in political life” (19).

7. See Elizabeth Outka (2011) and L. Chris Fox (2002), who both mobilize trauma theorists Ruth Leys and Cathy Caruth to address the violence of the novel’s content and the temporal displacement of its structure.

8. For a detailed analysis of how political protests like “Occupy Wall Street” directly engage with automobility, see Matt Talsma (2015).

9. See Hope Jennings (2010), who critiques readings of the ending as a utopian repudiation of “love laws” while arguing instead that, through nostalgia, the ending unearths Ammu’s forgotten story (197).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

D.E. St. John

D.E. St John (David) is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he has taught classes in Asian American literature, ecocritical approaches to the Anthropocene, and contemporary literature. His research interests include cultural memory, poetry, biopolitics, and postcolonial ecocriticism. His writing has appeared in Interventions and American Studies, as well as in the literary journals Prairie Schooner, Cutthroat, Atlanta Review, and B O D Y.