ABSTRACT
The fourth and concluding chapter of this book offers to read those contemporary fictions that thematically explore the crises of neoliberalism and, simultaneously, imagine a world beyond its control. In Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island, a novel thematizing environmental crisis and the threat to the planet, an old Bengali myth is reconstructed to launch an adventure that moves through four continents, unveiling the trail of global ecological devastation. Ghosh's novel explores the global production of refugees, either through natural catastrophes or through social issues, especially through imperialist wars. In Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the costs of India's religious and nationalist fundamentalisms are recounted, laying bare the processes of local manufacturing and management of the surplus population. Instead of only looking into the strategies through which the state, its corporations, and state-favored religion oppress and traumatize people, The Ministry also sheds light on the ways in which the victims of religious and corporate oppressions produce counter-sites so as to develop, out of the ashes of destruction, a counterculture imbued with utopian visions and qualities.
