The New Postcolonial Onto-Epistemology: Experiments of Assemblage in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome

초록

This article argues that Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome reveals the limits of colonial-modern epistemology and suggests a new onto-epistemology grounded in encounter, openness, and mutation. Against the Western model of rational knowledge and autonomous individuality, the novel imagines subjectivities constituted through contagion and assemblage, revising the very terms of modern selfhood. Drawing on Ed Cohen’s concept of immunity and Jasbir Puar’s theory of assemblage, the study shows how knowledge in the novel emerges not as a rational conclusion but as an ongoing experiment of encounter and becoming. Focusing on two sites of transmission―malarial infection and sexual contact―the essay tracks a shift from “a claim to know” to an “attempt to know, ” a posture that relinquishes rational mastery and control, undoes the modern fiction of a bounded self, and restores transpersonal connectivity, thereby opening a new political ontology linking disparate postcolonial subjectivities. Ghosh couples this epistemic critique with a formal experiment, unsettling the boundaries of detective fiction, science fiction, and postcolonial narrative and thereby producing a “generic assemblage” that enacts the transformative processes his postcolonial subjects undergo. Thus, by entwining epistemological revision with narrative hybridity, The Calcutta Chromosome ultimately proposes an ethics of assemblage as both a mode of relation and a method for apprehending “new postcolonial humans, ” whose subjectivity is contingent, interconnected, and continually becoming.

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