Imagining the Global and the Rural: Rural Cosmopolitanism in Sharon Butala's The Garden of Eden and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

Abstract

This paper will examine two novels set in rural places in different parts of the world: Sharon Butala's The Garden of Eden, set in rural Saskatchewan and rural Ethiopia, and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, set in rural West Bengal. While each novel is written out of a different national context, both raise a number of overlapping questions about the rural and the cosmopolitan. The novels each suggest ways of looking at physical places through the lens of cosmopolitanism to create what I will call a territorialized cosmopolitanism a cosmopolitanism that is located in specific, though often multiple, places.