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Abstract
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 (Citation2016) 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.
Acknowledgment
I could not have written this essay without the support and feedback of my mentor Professor Shalini Puri. Thanks to all the people for their generous engagement: Dr. Nicole Constable, Dr. Cory Holding, Dr. Troy Boone, Dr. Neepa Majumdar, Momina Masood, Paula Kupfer, Anna, Yue, Gabriela, Josh, Nicolette, and my colleagues at NICHE New Scholars Committee. Several people have listened to my arguments over the months and provided me with the intellectual and emotional community: Dr. Oishani Sengupta, Dr. Naveen Minai, Dr. Neelofer Qadir, Dr. Anwesha Kundu, Saronik Bosu, Silpa Mukherjee, Rahul Kumar, Ankita Deb, and Sreemoyee Dasgupta. A number of folks have cheered for me: Dr. Jay Shelat, Dr. Bassam Siddiki, Manasvin Rajagopalan, Ritwika Roy, Titas Bose, Barnamala Roy, Kush Sengupta, Gourab Goswami, Abantika Devray, Mapule Mohulatsi, Saptaparna Saha, Param Ajmera and Dr. Smaran Dayal. A word must be said about the two anonymous peer reviewers, Dr. Nilanjana Deb and my parents for their faith in my work.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sritama Chatterjee
Sritama Chatterjee is a PhD candidate at the Department of English, University of Pittsburgh. Her current research centers on ordinariness as an aesthetic category to revise how literary histories of environmentalism have been told in the Indian Ocean archipelagos and have been recognized with a Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from her university.