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 to offer an account of postcolonial multispecies collectivity as an alternative to the national collectivity that most previous scholars have seen at stake in that novel. Focusing particularly on the Sundarbans section of the novel, the article draws on multispecies justice and biosemiotics to recalibrate Gayatri Spivak’s question “Can the Subaltern 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.