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It is only right, to my mind, that things so remarkable, which happen to have remained unheard and unseen until now, should be brought to the attention of many and not lie buried in the sepulcher of oblivion.
-Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes
A quarter of a century ago, Raymond Williams called for more novels that attend to "the close living substance" of the local while simultaneously tracing the "occluded relationships"-the vast transnational economic pressures, the labor and commodity dynamics-that invisibly shape the local. To hazard such novels poses imaginative challenges of a kind that writers content to create what Williams termed "enclosed fictions" need never face, among them the challenge of rendering visible occluded, sprawling webs of interconnectedness (Writings 238). In our age of expanding and accelerating globalization, this particular imaginative difficulty has been cast primarily in spatial terms, as exemplified by John Berger's pronouncement, famously cited in Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies: "Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than a historical projection; it is space and not time that hides consequences from us. To prophesy today it is only necessary to know men [and women] as they are throughout the world in all their inequality" (qtd. in Soja 22).
Yet the legitimate urgency of spatial prophecy should not, in turn, distract us from the critical task-especially for environmental writers-of finding imaginative forms that expose the temporal dissociations that permeate our age of neoliberal globalization. To this end, Animal's People, Indra Sinha's fictional reworking of the Bhopal disaster, offers a powerful instance of a writer dramatizing the occluded relationships of transnational space together with time's occlusions. Sinha's novel stands (to adapt Williams's phrase) as a work of "militant particularism," yet it discloses through that dwelt-in particularity temporal and spatial webs of violence on a vast scale (Resources 115).1 Sinha's approach to the aftermath of the catastrophic gas leak at Union Carbide's Bhopal factory in December 1984 throws into relief a political violence both intimate and distant, unfolding over time and space on a variety of scales, from the cellular to the transnational, the corporeal to the global corporate. Animal's People can be read as a novel of risk relocation, not just in Susan Cutter's spatial sense but across time as well, for the transnational offloading of...