Compound Focalization in the Literary Hinterlands

In this chapter I consider hinterlands as necessary supplements: unseen and unseemly, concealed or obscured, but nonetheless essential to those broader humancentric stratifications and systems they co-constitute and maintain. Through a comparative reading of Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart and Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara, I draw on literary evocations of hinterlands lives to consider the scope in contemporary fiction to reconceive of hinterlands as places capable of eluding site-specificity, within the contexts of Achille Mbembe’s refutal of brutalist logic and Amitav Ghosh’s call for alternative literary readings. Turning to the more-than-human dimensions permeating Chen Qiufan’s speculative novel Waste Tide, I conclude by identifying fiction’s capacity to review hinterlands in compound ways that unsettle and reimagine human perspectives and places.