Cartographies: Relational Ecologies and Decolonial Belonging in the Works of Olga Tokarczuk and Amitav Ghosh

Author(s)

Md Samiul Azim, Department of English at Gazole Mahavidyalaya, Malda, West Bengal, India
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1923-083X;

Md Akidul Hoque, Department of English at Gazole Mahavidyalaya, Malda, West Bengal, India
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-3066-1057;

Farida Parvin, a State Aided College Teacher in the Department of English at Gazole Mahavidyalaya, affiliated with the University of Gour Banga
https://orcid.org/0009-0008-0289-5561;

Journal: Polish Journal of English Studies

Issue: 11.2 (2025)

Date: 15/12/2025

Page: 15

Quote As: Azim, Samiul et al., “Cartographies: Relational Ecologies and Decolonial Belonging in the Works of Olga Tokarczuk and Amitav Ghosh”, Polish Journal of English Studies 11.2 (2025): 17-36.

DOI: doi.org/10.64867/pjes.25435981.25.112.1091

Abstract

This article investigates the literary cartographies forged by Olga Tokarczuk and Amitav Ghosh through a comparative analysis of their works, focusing on how mythscapes and memoryscapes engender relational ecologies and decolonial forms of belonging. Against the backdrop of ecological crisis, mass displacement, and epistemic fragmentation in the Anthropocene, both authors craft narrative terrains that unsettle Enlightenment historiography and anthropocentric paradigms. Drawing on posthumanist theory (Barad, Braidotti), multispecies ethics (Haraway, Tsing), and postcolonial ecocriticism (Huggan, Nixon), this study employs close textual analysis to examine how myth, memory, and more-than-human agency configure new forms of community. It combines close reading with comparative ecocritical methods and formal analysis, situating the texts within archival, historical, and affective registers to trace how narrative form mediates ecological knowledge. Tokarczuk’s Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead interlace Polish folklore and ecofeminist motifs to challenge human sovereignty, while Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Gun Island weave indigenous myths into narratives of environmental precarity and colonial displacement. These texts function as posthuman cartographies—maps of entangled life-worlds where human and nonhuman agencies co-constitute history, kinship, and place. Through fragmented aesthetics, polyvocal narration, and diasporic geographies, Tokarczuk and Ghosh resist the cartographic logics of empire, instead envisioning planetary solidarities rooted in relational ethics. This article argues that their literary forms do not merely reflect ecological entanglement but enact it, generating speculative imaginaries for decolonial futures. By offering empirically grounded interventions into debates on posthuman ethics and decolonial memory, the article advances methodological and pedagogical frameworks for literary studies and suggests policy-relevant imaginaries for cultivating planetary solidarities. In reconfiguring the spatial, temporal, and ontological coordinates of belonging, their works provide crucial insights for re-imagining narrative ethics and global ecologies in a time of planetary instability.

Keywords: posthumanism, decolonial ecocriticism, mythscape, memoryscape, relational ecology, multispecies kinship

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© by the author, licensee Polish Journal of English Studies. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Received: 2025-07-21; reviewed 2025-10-19; accepted 2025-11-02