AFFECTIVE GEOGRAPHIES AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

Reading Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing

Abstract

This paper is a critical reading of the affective and emotional geographies imagined in the “Islands” plot-line of Shubhangi Swarup’s novel Latitudes of Longing (2018). The paper argues that Swarup presents the case of a rethinking environmental aesthetics that conveys a deeper sense of space, time, and place. By creating an ambient poetics to negotiate human and non-human interconnect­edness, the paper demonstrates the strength of novelistic traditions and their potential to generate an idea of affect that is transcorporeal – as one not located only in the site of the human body, instead, emanating from a more nuanced interconnectedness between the human and the non-human world. Informed by ‘affective ecocriticism’ and Zayin Cabot’s ‘multiple ontologies approach’ that generates ‘ecologies of participation,’ the paper closely reads the “Islands” section to establish how literary illustrations provide an instance to widen the horizons of environmental engagement and generate a narrative imagination that encompasses a larger ecosystem cutting across geological spacetimes in the Anthropocene. Swarup’s use of fiction is critically used to generate an ecoaesthetics that leads to a more informed ethical action towards recognizing the interconnectedness of living and non-living forms that create sustainable ecologies.