The way of words: Vernacular cosmopolitanism in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies  

Oleh:

Luo, Shao-Pin

Jenis: Article from Article
Dalam koleksi: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 48 no. 3 (Sep. 2013), page 377-392.
Topik: Cosmopolitanism; migration; politics of English; translation; vernacular languages
Fulltext: The way of words-Vernacular.pdf (339.7KB)

Isi artikel

In Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies I examine the ways of imagining and practising resistance by way of the concept of “vernacular cosmopolitanism”. I use the concept in two senses: first, as a cultural and political term that Homi Bhabha describes as a “cosmopolitan community envisaged in a marginality”, a form of materialist, actually existing, and rooted cosmopolitanism; second, in its vernacular, linguistic sense that reflects the way of words and the politics of language in the novel. In applying the term “vernacular”, I wish to bring to the fore — in the spirit of Sheldon Pollock’s groundbreaking work on “Sanskrit Cosmopolis” — the linguistic aspect of the concept of cosmopolitanism, which I feel has been inadequately discussed. In Sea of Poppies, language importantly serves both as an index of the cross-cultural fusion that was operating in the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and their littoral zone and hinterland in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and also as a trope for the emergence of new identities in the Ibis trilogy.

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