Towards a Post-Colonial Eco-Cosmopolitanism: Reviving the Sense of Place in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner Than Skin

Abstract

In an era of unprecedented global connectivity and ecological crises, the concept of “place” has been profoundly transformed within post-colonised communities. This study examines how literature, specifically Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner Than Skin (2012), as a medium can revive the sense of place, particularly the place sense redefined by the experiences of post-colonial eco-social catastrophes, as a dialogical co-habitation of human-non-human environment in mainstream academia. This study, at first, moves beyond the Western perception of place as an isolated source of individual identity. It then engages with the recent scholarships on “eco-cosmopolitanism” and political ecology of the global South to show how the forces of (neo)colonial-capitalist modernity and consequent eco-social crises in Pakistan were registered both in Khan’s experimental narrative content and style. This study argues that Khan’s novel employs a “post-colonial eco-cosmopolitan” approach, focusing on the fluidity of place-based identities and the challenges of narrating a post-colonial sense of place in the zones of conflict, catastrophes, and crises. Finally, this study contends that when socio-ecological crises affect various aspects of life—body, home, society, and environment—local cultural practices like oral story-telling, folklore sharing, and traditional rituals serve as sources of collective memory, providing inner stability amid external turmoil.

Keywords:

• Post-colonial socio-ecological catastrophes
• sense of place
• pakistan
• political ecology of global south
• post-colonial eco-cosmopolitanism

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Nobonita Rakshit

Nobonita Rakshit is a Research Scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, disaster narratives, and South Asian literature.

Rashmi Gaur

Rashmi Gaur is a Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India. Her research interests include Professional Communication, Culture and Gender theories, Modern Fiction, and Indian Writing.

Rahul K. Gairola

Rahul K. Gairola is The Krishna Somers Senior Lecturer in English and Postcolonial Literature and a Fellow of the new Indo–Pacific Research Centre (IPRC) at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He has published six books and over 50 peer-reviewed research articles in reputable forums. He is Area Editor of Diaspora Studies for The Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory and Editor of the Routledge/Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) South Asian Book Series. He is currently completing two new book projects with Routledge and starting a third with Oxford University Press.