Off-Shore Aesthetics and Waste in the Ship-Breaking Literature of Bangladesh
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11677757 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sritama Chatterjee (University of Pittsburgh, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 70-84 |
| Publication date | 2022-11-16 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Asian Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0275-9527 • E-ISSN: 2573-9476 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02759527.2022.2145745 |
| OpenAlex | W4309124272 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
Ship-breaking is a flourishing industry in Bangladesh where thousands of decommissioned ocean-going vessels from developed nations such as the USA, Britain, and France are broken down at relatively cheap prices. This causes marine pollution, poses serious challenges to coastal management, and risks the lives of shipbreaking laborers. In the last decade, literary and cultural texts have responded to the environmental crisis of waste generation in the ship-breaking industry of Bangladesh. I read two literary texts, namely Tahmima Anam’s novel The Bones of Grace (2016 Anam, Tahmima. 2016. The Bones of Grace. Great Britain: HarperCollins Publisher. [Google Scholar]) and Cameron Conaway’s poetry collection Chittagong (2014) to show how literary texts adapt their formal properties to communicate the dialectic of recycling and disposability of shipbreaking in language. I coin the term “off-shore aesthetics” to signal a set of narrative, poetic and visual practices in the literature on ship-breaking in Bangladesh that makes the site visible and illustrates the material impact of waste on the laborers. This reading of ship-breaking offers “off-shore aesthetics” as a model of literary criticism that captures the fragmentary nature of the off-shore as a place while providing an opportunity to reflect on the function of shipbreaking labor in global capitalism through form and poetics
Aesthetics · Art · Commodification · Criticism · Economics · Economy · Literature · Narrative · Poetics · Poetry · Seawall · Shore · Sociology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · International Maritime Law Issues · Marine and Offshore Engineering Studies · Geology · Oceanography
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |