Haunted ecologies: Limits of narratability and the Anthropocene Gothic in South Asian literature

This dissertation examines how South Asian postcolonial novels disrupt the epistemic and narrative structures inherited from Enlightenment thought and the realist novel to articulate the disorienting experience of living in the Anthropocene. Exploring the Anthropocene as a geohistorical epoch as well as an ideological construct shaped by the Enlightenment’s epistemological investments in rationality and mastery, I argue that the Anthropocene resists assimilation into stable narrative forms, generating a profound tension between the demand to tell stories of planetary crisis and the unrepresentability of the Anthropocene experience. Postcolonial novels from South Asia respond to this impasse by deploying what Rebecca Duncan terms the Anthropocene Gothic. I advance Duncan’s concept and treat it as a mode of narrative disruption marked by haunting, epistemic collapse, and affective excess. The texts I analyze utilize these narrative disruptions to produce texts in flux that grapple with the anxieties of representation itself. In doing so, they refuse the totalizing frames of stable narratives rooted in causality and instead offer narrative forms that foreground epistemic uncertainty, affective disorientation, and the uncanny. Crucially, these novels draw on indigenous epistemologies foregrounding alternative modes of knowing. By centering relational ways of engaging with the world, they expose the limitations of universalist, human-centered narrative of the Anthropocene. In so doing these texts open space for plural ways of storytelling and imagining the planet; ways that account for the uneven histories of colonialism and ecological violence that have shaped the current planetary crisis. The postcolonial novel thus becomes a site of epistemic refusal, offering a form in flux that grapples with the anxieties of representing ecological crisis while refusing to collapse diverse experiences and knowledge systems into a singular planetary narrative. Ultimately, this project foregrounds the need to read ecological crisis as a site of ongoing epistemological contestation, where postcolonial literatures reimagine how we tell stories about planetary crisis, loss, and survival.