ABSTRACT
In his collection Anatomic, the Canadian poet Adam Dickinson makes poetry out of microbiology, colonialism, capitalism, and pollution, foregrounding the inscription on and in his body of physical traces of the anthropocene; Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy in her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, despite the title’s apparent emphasis on an ethics of care, interweaves contemporary Indian history, ecological catastrophe, and violent territorial disputes in a sprawling story of India’s shift from postcolonial to colonialist state; Irish writer Mia Gallagher turns her attention to shifting European borders, both spatial and temporal, museography, and the legacies of colonialism in her novel Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland whose apparently nostalgic title reveals itself to be highly ironic. Canada, India, and Ireland were all colonized in the past, and the legacies of colonisation are still palpable today: India, Pakistan, and Ireland all bear the violent traces of a messy partition (as Roy’s and Gallagher’s novels show), while Canada’s First Nations and many inhabitants of India continue to undergo economic and political domination and discrimination.
