Can the Sundarbans Speak? Multispecies Collectivity in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Abstract:This article focuses on nonhuman agency in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and offers an account of postcolonial multispecies collectivity as an alternative to the national collectivity that most scholars see at stake in the novel. Focusing particularly on the Sundarbans section of Rushdie's text, the article draws on multispecies justice and biosemiotics to recalibrate Gayatri Spivak's question of whether the subaltern can speak. Ultimately, the article posits that the Sundarbans forest can indeed speak and that this agency highlights the need for postcolonial studies to more fully consider multispecies approaches and bioregionalism.