Waste-Wor(l)ds as Parables of Dystopian ‘Elsewheres’ in Postcolonial Speculative Discourse

Abstract

Postcolonial speculative discourse has often treated the threat of potential ecological wastelands emerging from the unwise actions of humankind. Significant examples of this type of writing are the short stories by Manjula Padmanabhan (1999; 2004) and Vandana Singh (2004; 2008), two Indian writers who employ the narrative format to critically address the environmental question and the possible creation of waste worlds, also bearing in mind real-life catastrophes such as the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy. In particular, in their short fiction, both authors appropriate and reinvent the architexts of utopia and dystopia to build up a complex system of deictic temporal shifts that allow an exploration of the future and a reflection on the central role of nature.
In this article I focus on some literary works by Padmanabhan and Singh dealing with the theme of waste, and I adopt an interdisciplinary approach that benefits from an amalgamation of postcolonial studies, cognitive poetics and ecolinguistics. Here I aim at investigating how discourse worlds of waste are triggered by the texts under consideration through the resources of the language of science fiction. In my view, since the conceptualisation and the rendering of the theme warn and challenge the reader to respond to important ethical questions, these dystopian narratives are set to work as parables that have to be cognitively processed and decoded. In the final part of the article I shortly broaden my research scope and also take into account Ian McDonald’s River of Gods (2004), SF novel that brings to the fore the idea of water exploitation and pollution in a futuristic Indian subcontinent, thus providing a further insight into the linguistic, stylistic and narrative construction of the waste theme.