Bio-Colonial Co-Optation of Knowledge: An Eco-Imperialist Investigation of Anita Desai’s The Village by the Sea and Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner than Skin

Abstract

My paper investigates the neo-orientalist discourse of eco-imperialism and postulates that eco-imperialism deploys biopiracy and bio-colonialism in order to subjugate the Global South while privileging the Global North. Using Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner than Skin and Anita Desai’s The Village by the Sea as sites of analysis, my study highlights eco-imperialist modes of subjugation in the texts with particular emphasis on knowledge production. Taking an interdisciplinary route, I have blended the pertinent theoretical concepts of Vandana Shiva and Laurelyn Whitt and inferred that eco-imperialism operates through the construction of an ‘authentic knowledge’ in which Western knowledges are privileged over non-Western knowledges. This involves the robbing of Indigenous knowledges and employing them as a commodity frontier through which the West profits off knowledge collected from developing nations while perpetuating western supremacy. My paper further explores, through the selected texts, the construction and projection of a reductive homogenised subjectivity on the inhabitants of the Global South by the environmentalist narrative, which does not only overlook their cultural specificities but also ignores the nuanced relationship individuals have with their environment. Keywords: Biopiracy, bio-colonialism, eco-imperialism, knowledge production, homogenised subjectivity, South Asian Anglophone Literature