ABSTRACT
Arundhati Roy is among the most ardent and widely recognized critics of globalization and the “war on terrorism” today. In her recent research and writing, she engages in a polemical exposé to reveal the invisible costs and consequences of global capitalism, as she tallies its devastating impact on the environment and India’s rural poor. There are those who wish to silence her, if not through legal wrangling and intimidation, then by attempts at dismissing her as a hack who, as a fi ction writer, lacks the technical expertise to write about big dams or nuclear bombs.1 Even those who admire her work may inadvertently romanticize it or diminish its impact through a cult of celebrity that exalts the singularity of her voice, thus discouraging any analysis that might contextualize it within contemporary global justice thought. This chapter examines her work, paying special attention to her articles and speeches, within those contexts, specifi cally making the argument that her work should be read for its participation in a vitally important body of postcolonial environmentalism. Some argue that inasmuch as her work draws from multiple paradigms of critique-including unacknowledged Marxist, postcolonial, and environmental feminist ones-it verges toward incoherence and muddle.2 I argue, on the contrary, that Roy enlivens these paradigms as she brings them together in a dynamic, complex tension, one that coheres around a mode of critique that might be identifi ed with postcolonial environmental feminism. Most signifi cant about Roy’s work in this regard is its postcolonial critique of environmental degradation and injustice; that is, one that looks at forces both outside and within India-at both global capitalism and confi gurations of state power, ideology, and capitalism within India. This postcolonial critique is important because many of the critics of globalization are focused exclusively on a global confi guration of forces, indeed so much so that remedies are often limited to a call for the reform of global fi nancial institutions. Thus they not only lack a critique of transnational capitalism but also an analysis of the deeply felt, intertwined ideologies of gender, caste, communalism, and nationalism within contexts of development politics at local and state
levels. Here, I analyze the tensions and possibilities that open up as Roy develops this critique-as she, in her words, attempts to “translate cashfl ow charts . . . into real stories” (Power Politics 32).
