Between colonial enterprises and imperialist dystopias: Amitav Ghosh's "The Calcutta Chromosome (1995)"

Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) unfolds in a time-bending, overlapping post-modern narration which, through the multiple, “transfective” embodiments of the malarial virus, refracts the global interconnectedness of human migrations, old and new colonialisms, and dynamics of hospitality and community formation. As I will discuss in my study, Ghosh's fourth novel imaginatively re-negotiates Asian American writing in a globalized framework, inaugurating the author's creative engagement, in the following decades, with broader and more ramified transatlantic histories across Europe, Asia and the United States. With a look at its circuits of publishing, readership, and reception the study will investigate how the deployment of a cyberpunk avatar aesthetic integrates, contests and re-inscribes South Asian American diasporic experiences and literary representations via gendered tropes.