ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 reads Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and discusses ‘death-facing ecology’ in relation to a selection of ideas from new materialism and speculative realism. It focuses on the way death is always both discursive and material. Key to discussions in this chapter are the ideas of Quentin Meillassoux and Martin Hägglund, which are applied as a means not only to illustrate the novel’s use of discourse and hegemony but also to show how a focus on death enables an egalitarian ethic to emerge. This reading illustrates how in this novel – as in all the novels discussed in this book – language (text) and the material world are in constant negotiation.
