Writing the disaster: substance activism after Bhopal
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dwaipayan banerjee - writing the disaster final version.pdf
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Author(s)
Banerjee, Dwaipayan
Date Issued
September 2013
Journal
Contemporary South Asia
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Citation
Banerjee, Dwaipayan. "Writing the disaster: substance activism after Bhopal." Cotemporary South Asia 21, no. 3 (September 2013): 230-242. © 2013 Routledge
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
In 2008, survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster in India undertook a 500-mile march to New Delhi, protesting a long history of governmental neglect of the survivors of the event. This is one episode of a 25-year-old organized international campaign that continues in the present. This article examines the ways in which three bodily substances – blood, hearts and ketones – were produced and circulated through the 2008 protests. Placed within a broader history of substance-politics in the region, this article suggests that these protests produced an imagination of bodily substances that surfaced messy contradictions that became difficult for the Indian State to disregard. This article also shows how these protests distanced themselves from the cynicism attached to similar modes of corporeal activism in the contemporary Indian landscape. In sum, this article traces the production of an activist corporeal counter-discourse that, for at least a time, contaminated the procedures through which the Indian State disregards the health of its marginal citizens.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2013.826623
