Heidelberg University Publishing

ABSTRACT This essay explores the contribution which postcolonial fiction may make to critiquing, shaping, and revising cultural narratives about science and related knowledge practices in diverse geopolitical settings. Singling out cultural narratives of a ‘spread’ of ‘Western science’ which have traditionally been a prominent component of twentieth-century modern­ization narratives, the contribution shows how postcolonial fiction can take the narrative representation of science and related knowledge practices beyond the cultural stereotyping whose formative influence has by no means been completely superseded in popular perceptions and even critical accounts of the cultural place of science. Set against the background of a spectrum of Anglo-American and South Asian ‘science novels,’ and drawing on conceptions developed by Ong and others (‘science as global assemblage,’ ‘Euro-American cosmopolitan science’), the essay offers a detailed reading of science and related knowledge practices in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost. The essay specifically highlights three related textual strategies that inform the dynamics of plot, character constellations, and narration: a first and fundamental strategy, the gradual pluralization of instantiations of science and related knowledge practices, is complemented secondly by the critical distancing against any bids to promote a cultural stereotyping of science. Both provide the basis for a third strategy, which makes Anil’s Ghost stand out among postcolonial science novels: the detail and intensity with which the novel works to establish and profile an alternative, culturally and geopolitically sensitive perspective on science.

KEYWORDS Euro-American cosmopolitan science, internationalism in science, postcolonial science, Science in fiction, science narrative