Unmasking the Uncanny

Making Colonial Injustices of Slow Violence Visible in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Abstract

This project analyzes the representation of colonial migration and imperial negligence, while shedding light on the rarely acknowledged issue of environmental migration and the longterm implications of environmentally displaced migrants. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon describes the concept of slow violence and how this violence disproportionately affects impoverished populations. This paper builds on Nixon’s work by grappling with neocolonialism’s impact and the resulting environmental migration of “undesirable” peoples to colonizing nations. An examination of the stories in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island shows how these topics can be brought to the present in literature. The paper aims to show how colonialism is directly tied to the presence of slow violence in underdeveloped areas and the increasing need for environmental migration. Colonial negligence in the “postcolonial” ignores the fact that conditions for environmental displacement were created by the powers that now deny environmental immigrants asylum.