Amitav Ghosh’s Hungry Tide and Gun Island as Contemporary Crisis Fictions and Their Key Features

In this paper, I would like to discuss the idea of crisis in relation to the new genre of fiction called ‘contemporary crisis fiction’. Emily Horton in the book ‘Contemporary Crisis Fiction’, 2014 speaks about this new coming-of-age genre of fiction called Contemporary Crisis Fiction and outlines its features. This is a genre of fiction that shares a common aesthetic of crisis and expresses socio-political concerns and cosmopolitan ethics of interpersonal responsibility and cross-cultural awareness. These fictions explore the experience of crisis and appropriate a crisis modality to comment on the contemporary socio-political disaffection as the contemporary subject is confronted with the lies of neoliberalist progress and its affective and ethical repercussions for the subject. It is a model of an aesthetic assertion that speaks to the post-consensus governments and captures the affective disenfranchisement and socio-ethical anxieties it has created in the contemporary subject. Strong social and ethical imperatives are at the heart of this genre of fiction. They are non-essentialist in approach and incorporate other-centered thinking as a way to respond to contemporary social crises. They complicate the postmodern skepticism by creating a cosmopolitan ethics that rejects relativism and protests neoliberalist pragmatism. Questions of truth, justice, and knowledge are paramount in these fictions as opposed to the textual relativism of postmodernism. I would like to explore Amitav Ghosh’s novels ‘The Hungry Tide’ and ‘Gun Island’ as belonging to this new genre of ‘contemporary crisis fiction’ and bring out their important features.