Lexington Books
Pages: 182
•
Trim: 6½ x 9⅜
978-1-4985-4045-2 • Hardback • November 2017 • $100.00 • (£77.00)
978-1-4985-4046-9 • eBook • November 2017 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
Pramod K. Nayar teaches English at the University of Hyderabad, India.
Introduction: Bhopal, Disaster, Precarity
Chapter 1: The Prefiguration of Disaster
Chapter 2: The Event of Disaster
Chapter 3: Bhopal’s Biopolitical Uncanny I: The Nature of Haunting
Chapter 4: Bhopal’s Biopolitical Uncanny II: The Haunting of Nature
Chapter 5: Bhopal’s Precarity: Toxic History and Thanatopolitics in the Postcolony
Conclusion: ‘Burial of an Unknown Child’ as Icon
Pramod K. Nayar’s book, Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny, offers a significant expansion of that limited cultural archive. Nayar engages a large textual corpus that includes fiction, drama, documentary and dramatic film, eye-witness accounts, photography, and Bhopali acts of political protest. . . . If much of ecohorror articulates environmental anxieties and fears in a cautionary mode of potential catastrophe, Nayar offers an important corrective, locating the ecological Gothic in a recent past and ongoing present. Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic will be of interest to researchers in postcolonial, environmental, disability, and disaster studies, and will likely spur further examinations into its textual sources.
— South Asian Review
Pramod K. Nayar’s application of the Gothic paradigm to texts emerging from the 1984 Bhopal disaster is a startling contribution to material ecocriticism and environmental justice ecocriticism. The Bhopal Gothic, in clarifying the haunted reality of this iconic event, also points to the precarity of our entire planet in the twenty-first century. This is a powerful and important book.— Scott Slovic, University of Idaho
Pramod Nayar's incisive reading of Bhopal brings cultural studies methodologies to bear on some of the most acutely pressing issues of our times. In our contemporary Anthropocene, we need activist-intellectual work of this type more urgently than ever before.— Russell West-Pavlov, Universität Tübingen